NBC News
updated 10:47 a.m. PT, Tues., Aug 18, 2009
Cause Celeb highlights a celebrity’s work on behalf of a specific cause. This week, we speak with actress Natalie Portman about her work advocating microfinancing with FINCA International and the Village Banking Campaign. Microfinance is a movement to provide financial services such as loans to impoverished people to alleviate poverty and encourage entrepreneurship. FINCA International provides financial services to low-income entrepreneurs in some of the world’s most poverty-ridden countries.
The Village Banking Campaign was launched by FINCA in 2007 in response to the desire to find a solution to poverty as outlined in the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. The campaign provides financial services for neighborhood enterprises in destitute areas.
Portman was named the first Ambassador of Hope by FINCA International and currently co-chairs the Village Banking Campaign with Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan. As Ambassador of Hope, she has traveled to Uganda, Guatemala and Ecuador and also filmed a documentary on FINCA Mexico.
Question: Can you tell me about FINCA International and the Village Banking Campaign?
Portman: FINCA International provides microloans, small loans, to primarily women in developing countries to start their own businesses. It has an incredible effect on all aspects of their lives, obviously economically, but it also improves their children’s education, nutrition and health care … their shelter, and their general sense of pride and agency in themselves. The campaign is seeking to reach more and more individuals and trying to go into more remote places where you can reach really the poorest of the poor.
Q: Please describe your role as the "Ambassador of Hope" for FINCA International and co-chair of the Village Banking Campaign.
Portman: My role is primarily one as a communicator. The people who are really doing the work are the ones on the ground and the women themselves who are working so hard to create their own businesses. My job really, within the organization, is to communicate it to the public and help fundraise, occasionally talk to politicians about helping finance our programs and also how to improve them.
Q: How did you learn about microfinancing and what attracted you to the idea?
Portman: I originally got into the whole world of microfinance because I was looking into things I could do that would affect the Middle East, because I am from Israel originally. When I was looking into it, I had the great opportunity to meet Queen Rania of Jordan who is also the most, probably, high-profile Palestinian woman in the world right now, and she was the one who guided me into microfinance. She said microfinance is a way to even out the hope gap, which is what exists between the poor and the rich; this is a way to improve the status of so many people who are suffering and that’s what leads them to … that kind of despair. So, if we want to create a sort of social equilibrium, we have to create an economic equilibrium first.
Q: How can microloaning improve the lives of women, who make up a large percentage of the world’s poor?
Portman: You are very correct in saying that women and children make up 70 percent of the world’s poor, and microfinance is an incredible way to give women the tools and the access themselves to change their own destinies. That is exactly the best thing you can do, because you’re empowering women at the same time you are helping them. They really feel that they’re in control of their own futures. They don’t have to wait for someone to help them; they can create their own business, and send their children to school as opposed to having to have them work at home. The kids get better health care, they eat better, and you just see sort of all the side effects of poverty really improved by this one sort of assistance.
Q: Can you share the most moving experience you had traveling as the Ambassador of Hope in Uganda, Guatemala, and Ecuador, or while filming the FINCA Mexico documentary?
Portman: They are all really compelling stories. One was really memorable in Mexico. A woman who was living apart from her husband because there was no employment in the town, and her husband had moved to the United States to work and was sending back money, as many people from Central and South America do. Not because they want to leave their homes and their families, but because they have to. And so, she was living apart from her husband and their two little kids, and he was sending back money, and they were far away. But there still wasn’t enough money, and she started this business with clay pots, and her business now is an enormously successful business.
They employ, I think, there was seven other employees from their village. They adopted the neighbor’s kids because the neighbors were not able to pay for their kids, so they adopted their neighbor’s child on top of their own. Now, her husband was able to come back from the States and be with her because they have gainful employment at home, where they want to be, in Mexico. So, it was really amazing to see how it wasn’t just money, it affected their love, it affected their personal relationships.
Q: What can people do to become more involved with microfinancing and your campaign?
Portman: The best way is through fundraising. Whether you fundraise with your friends or throw a party where everyone has to bring in five dollars for microfinance … then you can create a Village Bank. A Village Bank only costs $5,000, and then it exists there forever because the women pay back the loans. So once you put money in, it always is there, it’s recycled.
That’s why microfinance is so compelling, because once you put the money in, it exists in that place forever. It’s a real sustainable way of making an impact. So that’s really the best way. If people are really interested in it and want to devote their lives to it, there are incredible careers in microfinance that are similar to banking jobs, but they’re banks for the poor. It’s a really compelling career to choose.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Germany Hopes For 1 million Electric Cars By 2020
updated 1:52 p.m. PT, Wed., Aug 19, 2009
BERLIN - Germany launched a campaign Wednesday to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2020, making battery research a priority as it tries to position the country as a market leader.
The program, which draws on $705 million set aside in an economic stimulus package earlier this year but leaves many financing details up to the next government, drew criticism for being too vague.
"It is our aim to make Germany into the market leader for electric mobility," Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said after the Cabinet approved the plan.
He said the 1 million target by 2020 "is an ambitious aim, but one that we believe can be realized." Germany had more than 41 million cars on the road at the beginning of this year — only 1,452 of them electric cars.
The government plans to spend $162 million examining in eight test regions how the cars could best be introduced.
It also plans to put about $240 million into research on the batteries that power electric cars, making domestic production a priority and ensuring that German experts are trained in the technology.
"It is important that we couple a hopefully decreasing dependency on oil imports with not suddenly becoming dependent on battery imports," Guttenberg said.
The plan calls for electric cars to be put on the market starting in 2012, but does not specify what if any incentives might be offered to would-be buyers. Guttenberg said a market introduction plan would be examined, and financing would be a question for the next government.
Germany votes on Sept. 27 and the next government is sure to include at least one of the two partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel's "grand coalition" of the country's biggest parties.
Green Party: Plan underfunded
Opposition parties welcomed approval of the plan, but said it was far too short on both specifics and money.
The program is "significantly underfunded," Green party lawmaker Baerbel Hoehn said, comparing the $705 million announced so far with the $7 billion that the government is sinking this year into a bonus for Germans who scrap old cars and buy new ones.
Earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced $2.4 billion in federal grants to develop next-generation electric vehicles and batteries in the U.S.
Hoehn's party advocates a $7,000 subsidy for people who buy electric cars, which she argued would speed up their adoption. "Without support for the market introduction, the development plan is missing a significant factor for success," she said.
Germany's car companies have scrambled to catch up to their competitors elsewhere, particularly in Asia, in electric technology.
Competitors abroad
Earlier this month, Japan's Nissan Motor Co. unveiled the Leaf, an electric car that has a range of 100 miles on a single battery charge that is scheduled to go into mass production for a global market in 2012.
In June, Nissan's smaller Japanese rival, Mitsubishi Motors Corp., launched its electric vehicle, the $48,000 i-MiEV.
Elsewhere, others are planning their own electric cars, including Chinese automarker Dongfeng Motor Corp., which has teamed up with a Dutch company to develop and make them.
In the U.S., General Motors Co. is set to release next year its Chevrolet Volt, a rechargeable electric vehicle.
Germany's Volkswagen AG has said it hopes to introduce its first electric cars on the market in 2013, while Daimler AG is working together with California-based electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. on developing better battery and electric drive systems for vehicles destined for the consumer market.
Daimler and utility RWE AG plan to unveil a joint electric car and charging station test in Berlin by the end of this year.
BERLIN - Germany launched a campaign Wednesday to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2020, making battery research a priority as it tries to position the country as a market leader.
The program, which draws on $705 million set aside in an economic stimulus package earlier this year but leaves many financing details up to the next government, drew criticism for being too vague.
"It is our aim to make Germany into the market leader for electric mobility," Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said after the Cabinet approved the plan.
He said the 1 million target by 2020 "is an ambitious aim, but one that we believe can be realized." Germany had more than 41 million cars on the road at the beginning of this year — only 1,452 of them electric cars.
The government plans to spend $162 million examining in eight test regions how the cars could best be introduced.
It also plans to put about $240 million into research on the batteries that power electric cars, making domestic production a priority and ensuring that German experts are trained in the technology.
"It is important that we couple a hopefully decreasing dependency on oil imports with not suddenly becoming dependent on battery imports," Guttenberg said.
The plan calls for electric cars to be put on the market starting in 2012, but does not specify what if any incentives might be offered to would-be buyers. Guttenberg said a market introduction plan would be examined, and financing would be a question for the next government.
Germany votes on Sept. 27 and the next government is sure to include at least one of the two partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel's "grand coalition" of the country's biggest parties.
Green Party: Plan underfunded
Opposition parties welcomed approval of the plan, but said it was far too short on both specifics and money.
The program is "significantly underfunded," Green party lawmaker Baerbel Hoehn said, comparing the $705 million announced so far with the $7 billion that the government is sinking this year into a bonus for Germans who scrap old cars and buy new ones.
Earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced $2.4 billion in federal grants to develop next-generation electric vehicles and batteries in the U.S.
Hoehn's party advocates a $7,000 subsidy for people who buy electric cars, which she argued would speed up their adoption. "Without support for the market introduction, the development plan is missing a significant factor for success," she said.
Germany's car companies have scrambled to catch up to their competitors elsewhere, particularly in Asia, in electric technology.
Competitors abroad
Earlier this month, Japan's Nissan Motor Co. unveiled the Leaf, an electric car that has a range of 100 miles on a single battery charge that is scheduled to go into mass production for a global market in 2012.
In June, Nissan's smaller Japanese rival, Mitsubishi Motors Corp., launched its electric vehicle, the $48,000 i-MiEV.
Elsewhere, others are planning their own electric cars, including Chinese automarker Dongfeng Motor Corp., which has teamed up with a Dutch company to develop and make them.
In the U.S., General Motors Co. is set to release next year its Chevrolet Volt, a rechargeable electric vehicle.
Germany's Volkswagen AG has said it hopes to introduce its first electric cars on the market in 2013, while Daimler AG is working together with California-based electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. on developing better battery and electric drive systems for vehicles destined for the consumer market.
Daimler and utility RWE AG plan to unveil a joint electric car and charging station test in Berlin by the end of this year.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Food Banks Use Prison Labor
Inmates grow veggies to feed the hungry
Food banks struggling to meet demand turn to prisons for free labor
Kiichiro Sato / AP
Derrick Bennett, left, and Wilmer Kingery harvest potatoes at the Southeastern Correctional Institution in Lancaster, Ohio. Overtaxed food banks and underfunded governments are turning increasingly to prisoners for free labor to feed the hungry.
15 Most Wanted
The U.S. Marshals want your help finding their "15 Most Wanted" fugitives, a notorious list of suspects fleeing everything from murder and robbery to child sex charges. To date, about 200 of the fugitives profiled on the list have been found. Tips leading to an arrest are rewarded up to $25,000. Click here to see the fugitives.
updated 2:51 p.m. PT, Tues., Aug 18, 2009
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The nation's food banks, struggling to meet demand in hard times, are turning to prison inmates for free labor to help feed the hungry.
Several states are sending inmates into already harvested fields to scavenge millions of pounds of leftover potatoes, berries and other crops that otherwise would go to waste. Others are using prisoners to plant and harvest vegetables.
"We're in a situation where, without their help, the food banks absolutely could not accomplish all that they do," said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, a national association of food banks.
The number of Americans who couldn't afford food jumped 30 percent from December 2007 to December 2008, according to a survey by the group. Demand at some pantries has more than doubled, Fraser said, as job losses and wage cuts have strained family budgets.
States build work-training programs
State governments, with their own historic revenue shortfalls, can't keep pace with the need. Many have cut budgets of social service agencies, including those that provide food assistance to the poor.
Ohio and Michigan are among states that have expanded inmate farming projects specifically to feed the hungry.
Texas and Arkansas plan to enhance their food bank work-training programs, which provide labor and help make offenders employable when they're released. Food banks use inmates to sort, clean, shelve and cook food.
A 23 percent increase in food demand in Arkansas prompted Gov. Mike Beebe to allow inmates to gather otherwise wasted crops for food banks, said Phyllis Haynes, executive director of the Arkansas Food Bank Network.
Outside the Faith Mission in downtown Columbus, Ohio, Catherina Moore, 26 and homeless, said she's concerned that criminals might tamper with soup kitchen food. But she supports the practice of teaching farming skills to inmates.
"There's nothing wrong with teaching a man to grow food," she said. "A person can use those skills to survive. I think they deserve that training."
An opportunity to give back
Most of the prisoners who work in food bank programs are nonviolent, short-term offenders convicted of such crimes as drug possession or theft, prison and food bank officials said.
"Prisons are full of people who have taken all their lives, and this is giving them an opportunity to give back," said Ernie Moore, assistant director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, whose farming program begins with donated seeds and fertilizer from the state food bank network.
Alison Lawrence, a policy specialist at the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, said states battling high unemployment have found little downside to using inmates to fill food banks' mostly volunteer jobs.
"The underlying economic factor you have to weigh as a state with inmate labor is whether they're taking jobs from free, able-bodied people," she said.
Some states eliminate programs
In some areas, established inmate farm programs, seen as uneconomical or not relevant, are being eliminated.
New York plans to cut its state prison farm program later this year because the rural farming skills it teaches are viewed as impractical to prisoners returning primarily to urban settings.
In Arizona last year, food banks barely managed to save a program that uses inmate labor in Maricopa County.
Ginny Hildebrand, president and chief executive of the Association of Arizona Food Banks, said the state initially said it was too costly to employ enough guards to prevent inmate escapes. But the food banks argued that axing the program would mean the loss of millions of pounds of produce gathered by inmates at a time when demand had jumped 43 percent.
Second Harvest is a faith-based organization that uses church volunteers to pick food that would go to waste and gives it to food banks.
Food banks struggling to meet demand turn to prisons for free labor
Kiichiro Sato / AP
Derrick Bennett, left, and Wilmer Kingery harvest potatoes at the Southeastern Correctional Institution in Lancaster, Ohio. Overtaxed food banks and underfunded governments are turning increasingly to prisoners for free labor to feed the hungry.
15 Most Wanted
The U.S. Marshals want your help finding their "15 Most Wanted" fugitives, a notorious list of suspects fleeing everything from murder and robbery to child sex charges. To date, about 200 of the fugitives profiled on the list have been found. Tips leading to an arrest are rewarded up to $25,000. Click here to see the fugitives.
updated 2:51 p.m. PT, Tues., Aug 18, 2009
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The nation's food banks, struggling to meet demand in hard times, are turning to prison inmates for free labor to help feed the hungry.
Several states are sending inmates into already harvested fields to scavenge millions of pounds of leftover potatoes, berries and other crops that otherwise would go to waste. Others are using prisoners to plant and harvest vegetables.
"We're in a situation where, without their help, the food banks absolutely could not accomplish all that they do," said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, a national association of food banks.
The number of Americans who couldn't afford food jumped 30 percent from December 2007 to December 2008, according to a survey by the group. Demand at some pantries has more than doubled, Fraser said, as job losses and wage cuts have strained family budgets.
States build work-training programs
State governments, with their own historic revenue shortfalls, can't keep pace with the need. Many have cut budgets of social service agencies, including those that provide food assistance to the poor.
Ohio and Michigan are among states that have expanded inmate farming projects specifically to feed the hungry.
Texas and Arkansas plan to enhance their food bank work-training programs, which provide labor and help make offenders employable when they're released. Food banks use inmates to sort, clean, shelve and cook food.
A 23 percent increase in food demand in Arkansas prompted Gov. Mike Beebe to allow inmates to gather otherwise wasted crops for food banks, said Phyllis Haynes, executive director of the Arkansas Food Bank Network.
Outside the Faith Mission in downtown Columbus, Ohio, Catherina Moore, 26 and homeless, said she's concerned that criminals might tamper with soup kitchen food. But she supports the practice of teaching farming skills to inmates.
"There's nothing wrong with teaching a man to grow food," she said. "A person can use those skills to survive. I think they deserve that training."
An opportunity to give back
Most of the prisoners who work in food bank programs are nonviolent, short-term offenders convicted of such crimes as drug possession or theft, prison and food bank officials said.
"Prisons are full of people who have taken all their lives, and this is giving them an opportunity to give back," said Ernie Moore, assistant director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, whose farming program begins with donated seeds and fertilizer from the state food bank network.
Alison Lawrence, a policy specialist at the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, said states battling high unemployment have found little downside to using inmates to fill food banks' mostly volunteer jobs.
"The underlying economic factor you have to weigh as a state with inmate labor is whether they're taking jobs from free, able-bodied people," she said.
Some states eliminate programs
In some areas, established inmate farm programs, seen as uneconomical or not relevant, are being eliminated.
New York plans to cut its state prison farm program later this year because the rural farming skills it teaches are viewed as impractical to prisoners returning primarily to urban settings.
In Arizona last year, food banks barely managed to save a program that uses inmate labor in Maricopa County.
Ginny Hildebrand, president and chief executive of the Association of Arizona Food Banks, said the state initially said it was too costly to employ enough guards to prevent inmate escapes. But the food banks argued that axing the program would mean the loss of millions of pounds of produce gathered by inmates at a time when demand had jumped 43 percent.
Second Harvest is a faith-based organization that uses church volunteers to pick food that would go to waste and gives it to food banks.
Clean Coal exists?
Dear EarthTalk: As I understand it, “clean” coal really isn’t—yet the Bush Administration gushed strongly for it. What is Obama’s take on it?
-- John Zippert, Eutaw, Ala.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush differ in many ways, but both have embraced so-called “clean coal” for providing an ongoing supply of cheap and readily available energy for electricity generation.
The term “clean coal” is loosely defined as coal that is washed or processed to remove pollutants, so as to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas, when the coal is burned. Coal-burning plants emit 40 percent of U.S. CO2 pollution—half of our electricity comes from coal—so reducing the industry’s carbon footprint in any way possible would be a big win for the environment.
Luckily for clean coal advocates, the White House has been and continues to push for its development. George W. Bush’s support for clean coal dates back to his first term in office, when he stated that such technologies should be encouraged as a means of reducing dependence on foreign oil. And since taking office, the Obama administration has committed $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to clean coal projects.
But green groups continue to question the wisdom of relying on coal at all. Coal wreaks environmental havoc, from the coal mines that pollute rivers and streams, to the premature deaths of coal miners from accidents and lung diseases, to the release of greenhouse gases, mercury and other toxins at power plants.
According to Greenpeace, burning coal emits 29 percent more CO2 than does burning oil or natural gas. And coal-fired power plants are the world’s largest sources of atmospheric mercury, a known neurotoxin that disperses quickly throughout the environment and into the food chain. Greenpeace says that clean coal technologies will not address this problem, and that there are “no commercially available technologies to prevent mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.” Also, the group says, clean coal will do nothing to mitigate coal mining’s damage to wildlife habitat and drinking water sources.
“There is no such thing as ‘clean coal’ and there never will be,” Dan Becker of the Sierra Club told the Grist.org website. “It’s an oxymoron.” The Reality Coalition, a group of nonprofits that includes the Sierra Club, has been running TV ads seeking to debunk industry claims that coal can be clean. Green groups also worry that pushing clean coal will only delay the transition to a truly cleaner and greener energy infrastructure based on solar, wind and other emissions-free renewable energy sources.
In April of 2009, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. questioned the motivations of Obama and other politicians who back clean coal. “The coal industry and the carbon industry in general are the largest contributors to the political process,” Kennedy told ABC News. “You don’t have politicians representing the American public, but rather the people who finance their campaigns.”
Of course, Obama’s support for clean coal doesn’t negate the fact that he has proposed spending much more on further development of alternative energy sources. He has called for getting 10 percent of U.S. electricity from renewable sources by 2012 and 25 percent by 2025, and has committed upwards of $32 billion of stimulus dollars to the cause, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Environment America.
CONTACTS: Greenpeace, www.greenpeace.org; Reality Coalition, www.thisisreality.org.
-- John Zippert, Eutaw, Ala.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush differ in many ways, but both have embraced so-called “clean coal” for providing an ongoing supply of cheap and readily available energy for electricity generation.
The term “clean coal” is loosely defined as coal that is washed or processed to remove pollutants, so as to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas, when the coal is burned. Coal-burning plants emit 40 percent of U.S. CO2 pollution—half of our electricity comes from coal—so reducing the industry’s carbon footprint in any way possible would be a big win for the environment.
Luckily for clean coal advocates, the White House has been and continues to push for its development. George W. Bush’s support for clean coal dates back to his first term in office, when he stated that such technologies should be encouraged as a means of reducing dependence on foreign oil. And since taking office, the Obama administration has committed $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to clean coal projects.
But green groups continue to question the wisdom of relying on coal at all. Coal wreaks environmental havoc, from the coal mines that pollute rivers and streams, to the premature deaths of coal miners from accidents and lung diseases, to the release of greenhouse gases, mercury and other toxins at power plants.
According to Greenpeace, burning coal emits 29 percent more CO2 than does burning oil or natural gas. And coal-fired power plants are the world’s largest sources of atmospheric mercury, a known neurotoxin that disperses quickly throughout the environment and into the food chain. Greenpeace says that clean coal technologies will not address this problem, and that there are “no commercially available technologies to prevent mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.” Also, the group says, clean coal will do nothing to mitigate coal mining’s damage to wildlife habitat and drinking water sources.
“There is no such thing as ‘clean coal’ and there never will be,” Dan Becker of the Sierra Club told the Grist.org website. “It’s an oxymoron.” The Reality Coalition, a group of nonprofits that includes the Sierra Club, has been running TV ads seeking to debunk industry claims that coal can be clean. Green groups also worry that pushing clean coal will only delay the transition to a truly cleaner and greener energy infrastructure based on solar, wind and other emissions-free renewable energy sources.
In April of 2009, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. questioned the motivations of Obama and other politicians who back clean coal. “The coal industry and the carbon industry in general are the largest contributors to the political process,” Kennedy told ABC News. “You don’t have politicians representing the American public, but rather the people who finance their campaigns.”
Of course, Obama’s support for clean coal doesn’t negate the fact that he has proposed spending much more on further development of alternative energy sources. He has called for getting 10 percent of U.S. electricity from renewable sources by 2012 and 25 percent by 2025, and has committed upwards of $32 billion of stimulus dollars to the cause, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Environment America.
CONTACTS: Greenpeace, www.greenpeace.org; Reality Coalition, www.thisisreality.org.
Cars That Run On Water?
Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that cars can be modified to run on water. How is this possible?
-- Diane McMorris, Rockport, Maine
There are a number of online marketing offers of kits that will convert your car to “run on water,” but these should be viewed skeptically. These kits, which attach to the car’s engine, use electrolysis to split the water (H2O) into its component molecules—hydrogen and oxygen—and then inject the resulting hydrogen into the engine’s combustion process to power the car along with the gasoline. Doing this, they say, makes the gasoline burn cleaner and more completely, thus making the engine more efficient.
But experts say the energy equation on this type of system is not, in reality, efficient at all. For one, the electrolysis process uses energy, such as electricity in the home or the on-board car battery, to operate. By the laws of nature, then, the system uses more energy making hydrogen than the resulting hydrogen itself can supply, according to Dr. Fabio Chiara, research scientist in alternative combustion at the Center for Automotive Research at Ohio State University.
Moreover, Chiara says, the amount of greenhouse gases produced by the vehicle “would be much larger, because two combustion processes [gasoline and hydrogen] are involved.” Finally, there is a safety consideration for consumers who add these devices to their cars. “H2 is a highly flammable and explosive gas,” he says, and would require special care in installation and use.
The electrolysis process could be viable in saving energy if a renewable, non-polluting energy source such as solar or wind could be harnessed to power it, although capturing enough of that energy source on board the car would be another hurdle.
Researchers today put more focus on using hydrogen to power fuel cells, which can replace internal combustion engines to power cars and emit only water from the tailpipe. And though hydrogen is combustible and can power an internal combustion engine, to use hydrogen in that way would squander its best potential: to power a fuel cell.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are gaining traction, but commercialization of hydrogen fuel has not yet been accomplished. “The potential benefits of fuel cells are significant,” say researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). “[H]owever, many challenges must be overcome before fuel cell systems will be a competitive alternative for consumers.”
The state of California operates a “Hydrogen Highway” program that supports development of hydrogen fuel cell technology and infrastructure. And many companies are working on ways to produce, store and dispense hydrogen. Cars powered by fuel cells are in prototype stages now, nearing production.
While we all wait to see how that shakes out, the best choice today for high mileage and low emissions is still the gasoline/electric hybrid car.
CONTACTS: Center for Automotive Research, http://car.eng.ohio-state.edu; NREL, www.nrel.gov; California Hydrogen Highway, www.hydrogenhighway.ca.gov.
-- Diane McMorris, Rockport, Maine
There are a number of online marketing offers of kits that will convert your car to “run on water,” but these should be viewed skeptically. These kits, which attach to the car’s engine, use electrolysis to split the water (H2O) into its component molecules—hydrogen and oxygen—and then inject the resulting hydrogen into the engine’s combustion process to power the car along with the gasoline. Doing this, they say, makes the gasoline burn cleaner and more completely, thus making the engine more efficient.
But experts say the energy equation on this type of system is not, in reality, efficient at all. For one, the electrolysis process uses energy, such as electricity in the home or the on-board car battery, to operate. By the laws of nature, then, the system uses more energy making hydrogen than the resulting hydrogen itself can supply, according to Dr. Fabio Chiara, research scientist in alternative combustion at the Center for Automotive Research at Ohio State University.
Moreover, Chiara says, the amount of greenhouse gases produced by the vehicle “would be much larger, because two combustion processes [gasoline and hydrogen] are involved.” Finally, there is a safety consideration for consumers who add these devices to their cars. “H2 is a highly flammable and explosive gas,” he says, and would require special care in installation and use.
The electrolysis process could be viable in saving energy if a renewable, non-polluting energy source such as solar or wind could be harnessed to power it, although capturing enough of that energy source on board the car would be another hurdle.
Researchers today put more focus on using hydrogen to power fuel cells, which can replace internal combustion engines to power cars and emit only water from the tailpipe. And though hydrogen is combustible and can power an internal combustion engine, to use hydrogen in that way would squander its best potential: to power a fuel cell.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are gaining traction, but commercialization of hydrogen fuel has not yet been accomplished. “The potential benefits of fuel cells are significant,” say researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). “[H]owever, many challenges must be overcome before fuel cell systems will be a competitive alternative for consumers.”
The state of California operates a “Hydrogen Highway” program that supports development of hydrogen fuel cell technology and infrastructure. And many companies are working on ways to produce, store and dispense hydrogen. Cars powered by fuel cells are in prototype stages now, nearing production.
While we all wait to see how that shakes out, the best choice today for high mileage and low emissions is still the gasoline/electric hybrid car.
CONTACTS: Center for Automotive Research, http://car.eng.ohio-state.edu; NREL, www.nrel.gov; California Hydrogen Highway, www.hydrogenhighway.ca.gov.
EarthTalk
Dear EarthTalk: I’d like to know the relative electricity cost of utility scale solar and wind plants versus rooftop residential solar. In other words, how can I know whether to subsidize my utility’s alternative energy plant or renovate my own home?
-- Randy Wilson, Flagstaff, Ariz.
Making such a determination is complex, but you could start with “In My Backyard,” a new online tool by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). You first need to know your electricity usage and what size solar photovoltaic (PV) system or wind turbine you could install. Then, using Google Earth maps and data on the amounts of sunshine and wind at your location, the tool will estimate the electricity you could get from a certain size wind turbine or PV array installed on your property.
The costs to install renewable energy systems vary greatly by location, warn researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). And kilowatt hour (kWh) costs vary by utility, as do state and local financial incentives. One piece of good news: The federal Investment Tax Credit was expanded and extended this year. It allows for 30 percent of the cost of your system to be deducted from your federal tax bill, and is good through 2016.
Comparing the cost of going it alone to that of simply buying green power through your utility is not a simple equation, either. You can support your utility’s renewable power infrastructure by paying a premium on your electric bill, or you can buy renewable energy certificates—also known as green tags—even if your utility does not offer green power (green tags inject renewable energies into the grid even if they don’t come back to you via your own utility). To decide which equation is better for you, compare the costs of those programs over the same time period with the cost of building and maintaining your own system (minus any installation credits and/or revenues from selling your excess electricity back to the utility). That would give you the relative costs and return-on-investment.
But that’s still not the whole picture: Another question is whether your home system can continue to produce energy more cost-effectively than your utility, as it brings more and more green energy sources into its mix. Lawrence Berkeley says no, essentially. A February 2009 report summarizing the costs of PV from 1998 to 2007 concluded that larger systems averaged a 25 percent lower cost than the smallest ones.
The same is true for wind power, says the American Wind Energy Association. The group’s February 2005 report calculates that a large wind farm can deliver electricity at a nearly 40 percent lower cost than a small one. It also can take advantage of economies of scale in lower operational and maintenance costs.
The bottom line is this: Decades ago, when widespread use of alternative energy was still only a dream, building one’s own private source of home power was the only way to get off the carbon-intense grid and ensure that your own energy needs left little footprint. But today, with considerably more renewable energy sources coming online or about to do so in quantum leap measures—and at much greater efficiencies than can be achieved privately—the best bet may well be to forego the go-it alone path and support your utility’s efforts to generate green power not just for your own household but for everyone.
-- Randy Wilson, Flagstaff, Ariz.
Making such a determination is complex, but you could start with “In My Backyard,” a new online tool by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). You first need to know your electricity usage and what size solar photovoltaic (PV) system or wind turbine you could install. Then, using Google Earth maps and data on the amounts of sunshine and wind at your location, the tool will estimate the electricity you could get from a certain size wind turbine or PV array installed on your property.
The costs to install renewable energy systems vary greatly by location, warn researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). And kilowatt hour (kWh) costs vary by utility, as do state and local financial incentives. One piece of good news: The federal Investment Tax Credit was expanded and extended this year. It allows for 30 percent of the cost of your system to be deducted from your federal tax bill, and is good through 2016.
Comparing the cost of going it alone to that of simply buying green power through your utility is not a simple equation, either. You can support your utility’s renewable power infrastructure by paying a premium on your electric bill, or you can buy renewable energy certificates—also known as green tags—even if your utility does not offer green power (green tags inject renewable energies into the grid even if they don’t come back to you via your own utility). To decide which equation is better for you, compare the costs of those programs over the same time period with the cost of building and maintaining your own system (minus any installation credits and/or revenues from selling your excess electricity back to the utility). That would give you the relative costs and return-on-investment.
But that’s still not the whole picture: Another question is whether your home system can continue to produce energy more cost-effectively than your utility, as it brings more and more green energy sources into its mix. Lawrence Berkeley says no, essentially. A February 2009 report summarizing the costs of PV from 1998 to 2007 concluded that larger systems averaged a 25 percent lower cost than the smallest ones.
The same is true for wind power, says the American Wind Energy Association. The group’s February 2005 report calculates that a large wind farm can deliver electricity at a nearly 40 percent lower cost than a small one. It also can take advantage of economies of scale in lower operational and maintenance costs.
The bottom line is this: Decades ago, when widespread use of alternative energy was still only a dream, building one’s own private source of home power was the only way to get off the carbon-intense grid and ensure that your own energy needs left little footprint. But today, with considerably more renewable energy sources coming online or about to do so in quantum leap measures—and at much greater efficiencies than can be achieved privately—the best bet may well be to forego the go-it alone path and support your utility’s efforts to generate green power not just for your own household but for everyone.
A Bridge to the Renewable Energy Future
A Bridge to the Renewable Energy Future
by Robert U. Ayres and Ed Ayres
Renewables are coming fast. In the meantime, here's a largely overlooked but potent way to minimize fossil fuel use and the damage it causes.
Historically, Americans have been strong on big ideas, but not always so strong on the devil in the detail. So, for example, public officials looking for alternatives to imported oil have widely embraced corn ethanol, even though a range of studies assessed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others show that corn ethanol has a nearly zero net gain in energy output, while taking a heavy toll on human food-producing capacity. Or, many of those looking for "energy independence" still embrace the John McCain mantra to "drill, baby, drill," perhaps because the notion of increased domestic oil output comes across as a manly defiance of the Middle-Eastern chokehold on our gas pumps. More domestic oil might be an attractive concept, except that the numbers say it would add nothing to our energy supply in the next 10 years and would never come close to replacing imports. (The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that U.S. territories, including coastal waters, have 3 percent of the known remaining global oil reserves.) That latter fact has provided Al Gore and others an opening for their claim that renewables, in contrast to more oil drilling, could bring America to full energy independence in a decade. But that claim, too, betrays an embrace of broad concept that isn't completely realistic about numbers.
What can renewables in the United States really do in 10 years? The Gore vision has been facilitated by the observation that renewables are growing spectacularly fast, much faster than any fossil fuel. But of course, that's percentage-wise, not in gigawatts or barrels of oil-equivalent. The hard truth is that renewables have started from such a tiny base that even with exponential growth it will take a long time for them to take over a large share of the work now done by coal, oil, and natural gas. The picture is also skewed by the fact that at present, the lion's share of renewable energy is provided by hydroelectric power, which cannot significantly expand. Virtually all of the U.S. rivers that have significant hydro potential are already dammed. The percentages of U.S. energy provided by the other renewable sources, as of 2006, were as follows: biofuels 1.4, windpower 0.8, solar photovoltaic (PV) 0.4, and geothermal 0.1. Of these, only the three zero-something resources are carbon-free (biofuels may add to supply, but also add to emissions).
Of course, emissions-free renewables have continued to grow fast since then, and the expansion will likely continue. President Obama has called for a doubling of solar power in three years. But even assuming that could be kept up for the next decade, it would still bring solar power to only about 13 percent of U.S. energy supply. Moreover, achieving the clean-energy future is not just a matter of expanding clean-energy production; it also requires massive rebuilding of infrastructure-the electric power grid, recharging stations for electric cars, retooling of car manufacturing, the factories to build next-generation batteries and fuel cells, expansion of public transit systems, and so on. Not all of this will happen as fast as the growth in solar PV capacity has been. The production of tellurium, an essential component of the most advanced thin-film PV panels, could become a major bottleneck, for example. Tellurium is very scarce, much scarcer even than platinum, and any limitation in the supply could put a drag on expansion of PV capacity.
However you figure it, the U.S. economy will still be heavily dependent on coal and oil 10 years from now, and for many years after that. Yet, in the meantime, the internal combustion engine-powered auto industry is plagued with overcapacity, coal is ravaging the climate, and global oil production is likely to peak and begin its terminal decline even as demand for it is expanding hugely in China and worldwide. So as demand begins to dwarf supply, fossil-fuel prices will rise inexorably during a period when renewables will not yet have the capacity to take over. What will happen in the meantime?
Recapturing Lost Energy
One answer to that question can be seen in one of the dirtiest corners of the industrial past. A few years ago, behind the gates of a large, rust-belt factory in East Chicago, Indiana, the world's largest steel company, Mittal Steel (now Arcelor Mittal), began using a facility that captured waste heat from one of its fossil fuel-burning processes and converted that heat to emissions-free electricity. The facility, called Cokenergy, heated coal to extremely high temperatures to make industrial coke, a key input to the steel-making process. But instead of blowing the residual heat into the air, as is done in conventional coke-making, the Cokenergy facility intercepted the heat to run a steam turbine to generate power, which in turn was used to provide power to the big steel plant next door.
Meanwhile, a few kilometers down the road, a rival company, U.S. Steel, was using a similar strategy to generate emissions-free power from waste blast-furnace gas. In 2005, between them, the two rust-belt rivals generated 190 megawatts of carbon-free energy from their waste-more than the entire U.S. production of solar photovoltaic electricity that year. That was just the waste from two fossil fuel-burning plants in one corner of one state. Those two steel plants were-and are-using a strategy that, if more widely exploited, could hugely increase U.S. clean-energy output without any increase in fossil fuel consumption. It's a strategy that one of its pioneers, electric power engineer Tom Casten, calls "energy recycling." It was Casten whose company developed the facilities that now turn waste to clean energy for both Mittal and U.S. Steel.
Environmentalists, guided by the principle that we live on a planet of finite size, have vigorously promoted recycling for the past three decades, and recycling materials-paper, metals, plastic, water, yard waste, engine oil, even municipal sewage-is now well established. Yet, curiously, recycling of energy, which is essential to the processing and use of all materials, has been largely overlooked. That may be in part because we all know that energy can't actually be "used up." But Tom Casten shrugs that off; his phrase gets your attention, and what he's really talking about is the harnessing of energy that in conventional industrial processes is not used but thrown out. A factory blows its waste streams of energy-rich, high-temperature heat or steam into the air or a river, or gets rid of its flare gas by flaming it into the sky. If you've driven along certain stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike or the Cancer Alley region of Louisiana at night, you've seen flare gas. Intercepting those nightmarish waste streams can add a huge boost to the U.S. production of affordable, carbon-free, energy. Waste-energy streams aren't a substitute for renewables, of course; the point is, we're going to need both. And energy recycling from fossil fuel-burning plants can help us make the transition to renewables much sooner.
Those waste-energy streams are a kind of Roman Empire artifact of American economic history. For Americans, energy has always been cheap, The first main source was wood, so energy literally grew on trees. With the Industrial Revolution, coal and oil also proved abundant, and as the machine economy scaled up, the cost of energy progressively declined. Ever since, Americans have taken it for granted that the energy needed to drive our ingenious technologies would always be either free or cheap. So unquestioned was this assumption that when the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, famously promised in 1954 that "our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter," hardly anyone doubted him.
So the waste that poured from coal-burning trains or factories wasn't cause for alarm (and in fact was often seen as a sign of industrial muscle and progress), at least until the 1970s. Perhaps the oil embargo of 1973, when oil prices skyrocketed and economic output fell, should have been a warning that one of the key assumptions of mainstream economists-that economic growth would continue indefinitely, regardless of the price of energy-might be mistaken. But the alarm was quickly forgotten when the price of oil fell again. Energy waste (as distinguished from the energy efficiency of particular products or processes) never became an issue. In any case, the United States today operates at about 13-percent overall useful-energy efficiency. (Japan gets about 20 percent.)
That 13-percent figure may seem surprising to many, because we're used to hearing figures like "85 percent" efficiency for hot water heaters, or "10 times as efficient" for compact fluorescent light bulbs vs. incandescents, or "twice as fuel efficient" for hybrid cars vs. gas-burners. But the real numbers, as seen by a physicist or engineer, are more sobering. Again, economic history has played a role in our perceptions.
Illusions
Back in 1973, when the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was holding hearings on energy, the committee requested that a report be prepared to summarize the situation for the legislators and the public. The resulting report, "Understanding the National Energy Dilemma," was impressive in its graphics but curiously lacking in scientific understanding. According to the report's author, Jack Bridges, the dilemma was that energy efficiency was already so high that most options for improvement had been exhausted-so demand for electricity was out-running supply, and hundreds of new nuclear power stations were going to be needed.
Ironically, the immediate problem was solved by the energy crisis of that year and the next (much as the 2008 spike in gasoline prices was knocked down by the worsening recession), which resulted in a sharp drop in the rate of growth of anticipated electricity demand. Most of those new nuclear power plants were never needed or built. But the most interesting part of Bridges' argument was his calculation of energy efficiency. Without any cogent explanation, Bridges claimed that the United States was utilizing energy with an overall efficiency of nearly 50 percent. This number seemed so implausible that one of us (RUA) undertook a comprehensive calculation based on physical principles, and found that the real efficiency of energy use in the U.S. economy in those years was actually about 10 percent. The disparity between that and Jack Bridges' figure is so large that we need to digress for a moment to explain it.
Efficiency is a slippery concept. On the surface it is a simple ratio between an output and an input. That is perfectly satisfactory as long as the inputs and outputs are measuring the same thing in the same way. In the case of energy, however, it is tricky because, as explained by the First Law of Thermodynamics, "energy" is actually conserved. That means that the energy exiting from any process or transformation is always equal to the energy going into the process. There is no gain or loss, so the efficiency must be 100 percent by definition. So, the first problem with the Bridges document (and almost all public discussions of energy) is that these discussions are not really about energy, but about the useful component, which they do not define. However there is a technical definition of useful energy, which is energy that can do useful work. The technical term is exergy.
The distinction between the simplistic "simple-ratio" measure of energy efficiency and the technical measure of real output (exergy) is typically ignored, for instance, by companies advertising the energy efficiency of gas hot water heaters or other equipment. They may claim that the heater is 85 percent efficient because 85 percent of the heat from the burner goes into the water and therefore only 15 percent is lost "up the stack." The arithmetic might be correct, but it is seriously misleading because it incorrectly implies that heat at a low temperature is just as useful (in the sense of being able to do work) as heat at a high temperature. The temperature of the gas flame in the heater is very high, around 1,800 degrees (Kelvin) above absolute zero, while the temperature of the hot water that emerges is only a few degrees above room temperature (around 300 degrees above absolute zero).
The correct way to measure efficiency is to treat both the input and output in exergy terms. The input (say natural gas) has a high exergy content because it burns at a high temperature, whereas the output (hot water) has a very low exergy content because it is only a little above room temperature (as compared to the flame heat). So, the real exergy efficiency of a hot water heater must be very low, in the sense that the same amount of heat produced by the flame could have done a lot more work than it actually ends up doing when you wash dishes or take a shower. In effect, the heater wastes most of the temperature difference between the gas flame and the water. In exergy terms, the efficiency of most water and space-heating systems was (and still is) only around 5 percent. In exergy terms, much the same problem applies to all of those early-and most subsequent-calculations.
The resulting misconception has persisted not just in equipment advertising but throughout the economy, and may be one of the reasons that the Bush/Cheney administration-and media-were so disinclined to see further efficiency gains as having anything more than marginal potential. They thought the country was already doing pretty well on that front. Ironically, that sanguine view was perpetuated not only by promotional literature for water heaters and other products, but by the modifications made by hundreds of businesses in the 1970s and '80s to reduce pollution to meet the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts-modifications which also had the benefit of reducing fuel use and thereby improving energy efficiency. Since then, thousands of industrial processes and products have been made less polluting and (slightly) more efficient. Yet, all along, the bulk of the nation's energy has continued to go up in smoke.
The view that America is becoming ever more energy efficient has been further reinforced, recently, by well-meaning and well-justified promotion of compact fluorescent bulbs, hybrid cars, and the like. However, a more disconcerting view is revealed by tracking the efficiency not just of the water heater or lightbulb or hybrid power train, but of the sequence of processes from the burning of primary energy materials to the final "energy service." The economy is becoming increasingly electrified (newspapers giving way to telecommunications, offices to telecommuting, and, soon, gasoline cars to more hybrids and then plug-ins), so the place to begin this tracking is with the electric power plants. A barrel of oil-equivalent (the natural-gas or coal equivalent to a barrel of oil) going into the power plant becomes, on average, one-third of a barrel of oil-equivalent (as electrical energy) arriving at the electric meter box. But then, to get the overall efficiency of the actual energy service, you have to multiply that 33-percent efficiency by the efficiency with which the consumer uses that delivered power, whether it's to turn on a light, drive a car, or run a manufacturing plant.
Everyone knows now that an incandescent lightbulb has very poor end-use efficiency in terms of lumens per watt, and that compact fluorescents are far better. But while fluorescent lighting gets about three times the efficiency of incandescent (about 15 percent vs. the incandescent bulb's 5 percent), when multiplied by the 33 percent of the power delivered to it (.33 x .15), the total efficiency of the compact fluorescent light is just 5 percent.
Similarly, we may be encouraged by the advent of plug-in electric cars, but while the average mechanical efficiency of an electric motor is around 80 percent (depending on size, speed, etc.), the charge-discharge cycle for the battery itself probably loses 20 percent each way, so a car using plug-in electricity from a 33-percent-efficiency central power plant might have an overall efficiency around 16 to 18 percent. That is a lot more efficient than a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle operating in city traffic, but still ends up letting five of every six barrels of oil-equivalent go to waste.
Then consider the payload efficiency you get when you drive a car. Set aside the question of whether it makes sense, in a country where energy is no longer cheap, to move over a thousand kilograms of steel in order to transport your 100 kilograms, or whatever you and your luggage or shopping bags weigh. The exergy efficiency of moving the car itself is about 10 percent, so the payload efficiency of what's being transported (assuming it's one-tenth the weight of the car) is about 1 percent. If you carry a second person, or have a lot of stuff in the back, the payload efficiency might be 2 or 3 percent. If the car is electric, you might get 4 percent. Some day, historians will shake their heads in wonder. Buses and trucks do a lot better on payload, but if you add up all the different kinds of energy use in the United States, the overall efficiency of producing useful work is just that 13 percent.
Barriers and Breakthroughs
For many years, the assumption of most industries that they were already operating at close to optimal efficiency, combined with the low cost of fuel for most of the past century, meant that as a public policy issue, energy efficiency was of only marginal interest except to environmentalists. Few people grasped that the country's energy efficiency was so poor and that there was so much potential for increasing actual energy service (lighting, heating, mobility, communications) without consuming more fossil fuel.
Tom Casten, however, saw this disparity between prevailing ideology and the physical reality as a business opportunity. About a decade ago, he formed an energy service company, Primary Energy. His idea was to approach industries that used coal, oil, or natural gas to fire their plants, and offer to capture their waste energy and turn it into electricity that was not only cheaper than what the plant was currently buying, but also produced no carbon emissions. If his company could produce 10 megawatts (MW) of clean electricity from the plant's waste, at a nicely discounted price (since the coal or oil had already been purchased for the plant's core business), that was also 10 MW that the local utility wouldn't have to produce by burning coal or natural gas.
One of Casten's first attempts to sell the idea was to a carbon-black plant in Louisiana. Carbon black is a petroleum-based product used mainly in making tires. In the late 1990s, the Massachusetts-based Cabot Corporation was the largest U.S. producer of carbon black. But the company was being hobbled by a worrisome pattern, which was to become increasingly familiar to U.S. industry during the following decade: While its foreign operations were thriving, its domestic production was barely profitable. In 1999, the situation significantly worsened as crude oil prices rose and the company's sales were undercut by rising imports of cheap foreign tires. Cabot needed a way to reduce costs. It was also under some pressure to reduce its air pollution, as making carbon black is an exceptionally dirty process that basically involves spraying oil particles into a flame. At its two Louisiana plants, Canal and Ville Platte, Cabot was emitting about 23 million kilograms of pollutants per year from its smokestacks.
Primary Energy proposed building a facility that would intercept Cabot's hot flue gas and convert it to clean electric power. An agreement was drawn up whereby the energy recycling facility would be built next to the carbon-black plant, which was emitting enough hot gas to generate 30 MW of electricity. The Cabot plant was using 10 MW, and it was currently purchasing that 10 MW from the local electric utility, CLECO, at a price of US$55 per megawatthour (MWh). In the proposed deal with the energy-recycling company, it was agreed that the needed 10 MW would now be provided by the recycling facility for $45 per MWh. By using its own waste to power its plant (waste out one door, power back in the other), Cabot would gain a double dividend: It would cut the cost of its Louisiana operation, improving the marginal profitability of its domestic production; and it would greatly reduce its embarrassing pollution output.
The only other principal condition was that since the recycling facility had a 30-MW capacity and would be selling just 10 MW back to Cabot, it would need another buyer for the remaining 20 MW. Because it would not have to purchase fuel to make power the way the utility did, it could sell power at a discount (as it would be doing for Cabot), and since every buyer likes a discount, the deal seemed pretty close to a slam dunk. As it happened, there was another carbon-black plant, Columbian Chemicals (a subsidiary of Phelps-Dodge), just across the road that, like Cabot, was currently buying its power from the utility for $55 per MWh and would be more than happy to buy it from the recycling facility for less.
There was, however, one problem. The law in Louisiana, and almost everywhere else in the country, does not permit anyone other than the utility monopoly to sell power. It was made clear that the only way the deal could work would be for the utility to serve as a middleman-for the recycling facility to send its extra 20 MW to the utility, which would then sell it to the buyer. Since the power would essentially go in one door of the utility and out the other, with no intermediate processing, the utility would incur only an administrative cost, which would be negligible. Ideally, the recycling facility could sell to the utility at $45 and the utility could sell to the buyer at $50 and still be passing along part of the discount the buyer would have had if the law hadn't prohibited a direct transmission across the road. You might think that CLECO would accept a windfall profit of around $5 per MWh for itself while helping to perform the public service of substantially reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants.
However, CLECO saw it differently. To them it was a loss of retail sales to both Cabot and Columbia Chemicals. Worse, it undermined their pending case to the public utility commission for building a new $50 million transmission line to serve the Canal and Ville Platte area, the cost of which could then be added to their rate base for the whole state. But the real problem with approving a recycling deal was that by reducing demand for power in that area of the state, the recycling facility would also undermine the utility's case for building future "central" power plants, the cost of which would also be included in its rate base. Why go along with a project that would reduce the state's fuel use, when it could hold out for an arrangement that would let it profit from increasing fuel use?
So, rather than agreeing to the opportunity for a win-win solution for the community, the utility said it would only pay $20 per MWh for the remaining 20 MW-a deal killer, since the recycling facility could not operate profitably at that rate and clearly couldn't undertake construction if that was all it would get. CLECO stuck to that price for a year, before raising its offer to $28-still far too low for the plan to work. After two more years, the utility raised its offer to $38, which was close but still tauntingly short of what would have worked. By this time, however, both Cabot and Primary Energy had reached the end of their rope and the project was abandoned.
Soon afterward, CLECO applied for-and quickly received-permission to build its hoped-for new central power plant, at least in part to provide the capacity that would have been provided by the energy recycling plant. The difference was that now that capacity would have to be provided by an additional supply of fuel burned at 33-percent efficiency, along with its commensurate power plant emissions. In the years since then, the Cabot facility has had to continue pouring its emissions into the sky instead of having them intercepted and turned into clean power.
The Cabot project failed-and hundreds of other projects that could have cut U.S. fossil fuel combustion and carbon emissions have similarly been scotched-because of institutional barriers, outdated laws, and pervasive misconceptions that have been kept out of public discussion. Among them:
‑A fundamental weakness of the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), which was intended to encourage local competition in electric power production and distribution (including solar and wind), but which has failed to do so in part because the Act leaves it to individual states to enforce. Some states, including Louisiana (the number-one producer of petroleum products) have ignored it. The Act has no teeth.
‑Regulated pricing that allows no credit to local producers of wind or solar power for eliminating the transmission costs of central power plants, or for producing electricity without generating carbon emissions. Even if you generate enough solar PV electricity to sell some back to the utility, there is no economic incentive to do so.
‑The laws that in effect prevent electricity producers (such as Primary Energy, but also such as individuals or small businesses generating solar or wind power) from selling to willing buyers across the street. Utilities (and the public utility commissions that largely do their bidding) own unchallenged monopoly power over anyone (other than fellow utilities) who tries to compete with them. Small solar or wind entrepreneurs are priced out by law.
While Casten's Louisiana venture was effectively killed off, his initiatives in Indiana have succeeded because the power produced by the Mittal coking facility isn't being transmitted across any public streets; it's being sold to the adjoining Mittal Steel property. At U.S. Steel, similarly, the waste-stream energy isn't being sold to another company across town, but is only being used for in-house power. At a giant Kodak plant in Rochester, New York, waste process steam is used to make power for the company's own use.
There are roughly a thousand other U.S. plants already doing waste-energy recycling. In addition to the two aforementioned Indiana steel plants, they include 12 other steel plants. An Illinois-based company, Turbosteam, has built waste-heat recycling facilities for plants in the chemical, petroleum, pulp and paper, food-processing, textiles, and automotive industries, as well as well as for college campuses, military bases, prisons, and hospitals. At a huge complex in Rochester, New York, the Kodak Corporation generates its own electricity from waste process steam. At a West Virginia silicon-processing plant, West Virginia Alloys, a unit of Globe Specialty Metals, recently invested about $50 million to install a facility that will capture waste heat from its electric arc furnaces. The operation will provide over 40 MW of emissions-free electricity, offsetting about a third of the company's electric consumption. West Virginia Alloys president Arden Sims points out that this will give his company a competitive advantage over other silicon producers that typically vent their waste heat.
All told, U.S. waste-energy recycling is contributing about 10,000 megawatts of electric power to the national total each year, according to the latest available data. Yet, according to a recent study for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than 10 times that amount could be generated in 19 different U.S. industries just by recycling wasted heat. Most of it would be electricity replacing electric power currently purchased from coal- or natural gas-burning utilities. To put that potential in a broader perspective, we should note that waste-energy recycling of the kind we have been describing is a form of combined heat and power (CHP), which includes the even larger potential to be achieved by exploiting the waste heat emitted by electric power plants (see page 37). The heat from power plants can't be used to generate electricity because it is too low in temperature, but if the generation is moved to local production in the places where low-temperature heat could be used for heating homes and buildings, the largest single drain on U.S. primary energy could be largely eliminated. Data for CHP don't always separate out local-production CHP from high-temperature waste-stream recycling, but it is noteworthy that while the United States uses relatively little of either, both forms are now widely used in some other countries. One reason Arcelor Mittal was receptive to energy recycling in Indiana was that this technology is now widely used in northern Europe and Japan, where Mittal has other operations. Denmark now generates over 50 percent of its electricity by waste-energy recycling or CHP; Finland gets 40 percent, and Russia gets over 30 percent. U.S. industries have barely scratched the surface. The 14 steel plants recycling waste heat or flare gas, for example, constitute only 2 percent of the plants in the U.S. steel industry.
That brings us back to Tom Casten and his son Sean, who are entrepreneurs of the kind economists have in mind when they speak of "technological progress"-but who are acutely aware of the importance both of energy productivity and of the abundance of business opportunity in that realm. Businesses like theirs may benefit from government boosts, but as public awareness of the new energy paradigm grows, they'll also get stronger support from private investment. In 2006, the Castens set up a new company, Recycled Energy Development (RED). And in November 2007, RED announced that it had been approved to receive up to $1.5 billion in private investment from the Boston-based private-equity fund Denham Capital Management. Major investors included Harvard University and Bill Gates. Energy recycling had come a long way from its Louisiana fiasco.
The Recycled Energy Development announcement was not an anomaly. As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to rise-and as public concerns about the global energy dilemma also rise-private investment in the energy transition bridge may shift from tentative to robust. The key, as we have shown, is that in many cases, such investments can bring the double dividends of both corporate and social benefits, often with a rapid return on investment. That discovery "is allowing much bigger capital deployments than we've seen," said John Balbach, a managing partner at Cleantech Group LLC of Brighton, Michigan, at the time of the RED announcement. And as Riaz Siddiqui, a senior managing director at Denham, put it, "The exciting feature is reducing the carbon footprint of U.S. industry profitably."
If the energy content of all U.S. smokestack waste were recycled, it could replace about 30 percent of the electricity now produced by burning fossil fuels. Even so, energy recycling is just one of several high-potential strategies we know of that can reduce both fossil-fuel use and carbon emissions during the long transitional period ahead. Yet most of them have received little or no attention from mainstream media and policymakers. In a book to be published next January by Prentice Hall, Crossing the Energy Divide, we emphasize that none of these strategies depends on new or yet-to-be-developed technologies; all are well proven. Most are (quietly) being used profitably. Public discussion of them has been discouraged by utility lobbyists, oil-company advertising, talk-radio campaigns by oil-funded politicians such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe (the one who famously said "Global warming is a liberal hoax"), and by the historically entrenched inclination to expect that energy will always be cheap. Once these barriers have been cleared, the U.S. and global energy economies can establish a solid bridge to the day when renewables will substantially replace fossil fuels.
Robert U. Ayres is emeritus professor of technology and economics at the European business school INSEAD, in Fountainbleau, France. Ed Ayres is a former editor of World Watch. The brothers' forthcoming book will be published under the Whatrton School imprint of Prentice Hall.
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by Robert U. Ayres and Ed Ayres
Renewables are coming fast. In the meantime, here's a largely overlooked but potent way to minimize fossil fuel use and the damage it causes.
Historically, Americans have been strong on big ideas, but not always so strong on the devil in the detail. So, for example, public officials looking for alternatives to imported oil have widely embraced corn ethanol, even though a range of studies assessed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others show that corn ethanol has a nearly zero net gain in energy output, while taking a heavy toll on human food-producing capacity. Or, many of those looking for "energy independence" still embrace the John McCain mantra to "drill, baby, drill," perhaps because the notion of increased domestic oil output comes across as a manly defiance of the Middle-Eastern chokehold on our gas pumps. More domestic oil might be an attractive concept, except that the numbers say it would add nothing to our energy supply in the next 10 years and would never come close to replacing imports. (The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that U.S. territories, including coastal waters, have 3 percent of the known remaining global oil reserves.) That latter fact has provided Al Gore and others an opening for their claim that renewables, in contrast to more oil drilling, could bring America to full energy independence in a decade. But that claim, too, betrays an embrace of broad concept that isn't completely realistic about numbers.
What can renewables in the United States really do in 10 years? The Gore vision has been facilitated by the observation that renewables are growing spectacularly fast, much faster than any fossil fuel. But of course, that's percentage-wise, not in gigawatts or barrels of oil-equivalent. The hard truth is that renewables have started from such a tiny base that even with exponential growth it will take a long time for them to take over a large share of the work now done by coal, oil, and natural gas. The picture is also skewed by the fact that at present, the lion's share of renewable energy is provided by hydroelectric power, which cannot significantly expand. Virtually all of the U.S. rivers that have significant hydro potential are already dammed. The percentages of U.S. energy provided by the other renewable sources, as of 2006, were as follows: biofuels 1.4, windpower 0.8, solar photovoltaic (PV) 0.4, and geothermal 0.1. Of these, only the three zero-something resources are carbon-free (biofuels may add to supply, but also add to emissions).
Of course, emissions-free renewables have continued to grow fast since then, and the expansion will likely continue. President Obama has called for a doubling of solar power in three years. But even assuming that could be kept up for the next decade, it would still bring solar power to only about 13 percent of U.S. energy supply. Moreover, achieving the clean-energy future is not just a matter of expanding clean-energy production; it also requires massive rebuilding of infrastructure-the electric power grid, recharging stations for electric cars, retooling of car manufacturing, the factories to build next-generation batteries and fuel cells, expansion of public transit systems, and so on. Not all of this will happen as fast as the growth in solar PV capacity has been. The production of tellurium, an essential component of the most advanced thin-film PV panels, could become a major bottleneck, for example. Tellurium is very scarce, much scarcer even than platinum, and any limitation in the supply could put a drag on expansion of PV capacity.
However you figure it, the U.S. economy will still be heavily dependent on coal and oil 10 years from now, and for many years after that. Yet, in the meantime, the internal combustion engine-powered auto industry is plagued with overcapacity, coal is ravaging the climate, and global oil production is likely to peak and begin its terminal decline even as demand for it is expanding hugely in China and worldwide. So as demand begins to dwarf supply, fossil-fuel prices will rise inexorably during a period when renewables will not yet have the capacity to take over. What will happen in the meantime?
Recapturing Lost Energy
One answer to that question can be seen in one of the dirtiest corners of the industrial past. A few years ago, behind the gates of a large, rust-belt factory in East Chicago, Indiana, the world's largest steel company, Mittal Steel (now Arcelor Mittal), began using a facility that captured waste heat from one of its fossil fuel-burning processes and converted that heat to emissions-free electricity. The facility, called Cokenergy, heated coal to extremely high temperatures to make industrial coke, a key input to the steel-making process. But instead of blowing the residual heat into the air, as is done in conventional coke-making, the Cokenergy facility intercepted the heat to run a steam turbine to generate power, which in turn was used to provide power to the big steel plant next door.
Meanwhile, a few kilometers down the road, a rival company, U.S. Steel, was using a similar strategy to generate emissions-free power from waste blast-furnace gas. In 2005, between them, the two rust-belt rivals generated 190 megawatts of carbon-free energy from their waste-more than the entire U.S. production of solar photovoltaic electricity that year. That was just the waste from two fossil fuel-burning plants in one corner of one state. Those two steel plants were-and are-using a strategy that, if more widely exploited, could hugely increase U.S. clean-energy output without any increase in fossil fuel consumption. It's a strategy that one of its pioneers, electric power engineer Tom Casten, calls "energy recycling." It was Casten whose company developed the facilities that now turn waste to clean energy for both Mittal and U.S. Steel.
Environmentalists, guided by the principle that we live on a planet of finite size, have vigorously promoted recycling for the past three decades, and recycling materials-paper, metals, plastic, water, yard waste, engine oil, even municipal sewage-is now well established. Yet, curiously, recycling of energy, which is essential to the processing and use of all materials, has been largely overlooked. That may be in part because we all know that energy can't actually be "used up." But Tom Casten shrugs that off; his phrase gets your attention, and what he's really talking about is the harnessing of energy that in conventional industrial processes is not used but thrown out. A factory blows its waste streams of energy-rich, high-temperature heat or steam into the air or a river, or gets rid of its flare gas by flaming it into the sky. If you've driven along certain stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike or the Cancer Alley region of Louisiana at night, you've seen flare gas. Intercepting those nightmarish waste streams can add a huge boost to the U.S. production of affordable, carbon-free, energy. Waste-energy streams aren't a substitute for renewables, of course; the point is, we're going to need both. And energy recycling from fossil fuel-burning plants can help us make the transition to renewables much sooner.
Those waste-energy streams are a kind of Roman Empire artifact of American economic history. For Americans, energy has always been cheap, The first main source was wood, so energy literally grew on trees. With the Industrial Revolution, coal and oil also proved abundant, and as the machine economy scaled up, the cost of energy progressively declined. Ever since, Americans have taken it for granted that the energy needed to drive our ingenious technologies would always be either free or cheap. So unquestioned was this assumption that when the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, famously promised in 1954 that "our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter," hardly anyone doubted him.
So the waste that poured from coal-burning trains or factories wasn't cause for alarm (and in fact was often seen as a sign of industrial muscle and progress), at least until the 1970s. Perhaps the oil embargo of 1973, when oil prices skyrocketed and economic output fell, should have been a warning that one of the key assumptions of mainstream economists-that economic growth would continue indefinitely, regardless of the price of energy-might be mistaken. But the alarm was quickly forgotten when the price of oil fell again. Energy waste (as distinguished from the energy efficiency of particular products or processes) never became an issue. In any case, the United States today operates at about 13-percent overall useful-energy efficiency. (Japan gets about 20 percent.)
That 13-percent figure may seem surprising to many, because we're used to hearing figures like "85 percent" efficiency for hot water heaters, or "10 times as efficient" for compact fluorescent light bulbs vs. incandescents, or "twice as fuel efficient" for hybrid cars vs. gas-burners. But the real numbers, as seen by a physicist or engineer, are more sobering. Again, economic history has played a role in our perceptions.
Illusions
Back in 1973, when the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was holding hearings on energy, the committee requested that a report be prepared to summarize the situation for the legislators and the public. The resulting report, "Understanding the National Energy Dilemma," was impressive in its graphics but curiously lacking in scientific understanding. According to the report's author, Jack Bridges, the dilemma was that energy efficiency was already so high that most options for improvement had been exhausted-so demand for electricity was out-running supply, and hundreds of new nuclear power stations were going to be needed.
Ironically, the immediate problem was solved by the energy crisis of that year and the next (much as the 2008 spike in gasoline prices was knocked down by the worsening recession), which resulted in a sharp drop in the rate of growth of anticipated electricity demand. Most of those new nuclear power plants were never needed or built. But the most interesting part of Bridges' argument was his calculation of energy efficiency. Without any cogent explanation, Bridges claimed that the United States was utilizing energy with an overall efficiency of nearly 50 percent. This number seemed so implausible that one of us (RUA) undertook a comprehensive calculation based on physical principles, and found that the real efficiency of energy use in the U.S. economy in those years was actually about 10 percent. The disparity between that and Jack Bridges' figure is so large that we need to digress for a moment to explain it.
Efficiency is a slippery concept. On the surface it is a simple ratio between an output and an input. That is perfectly satisfactory as long as the inputs and outputs are measuring the same thing in the same way. In the case of energy, however, it is tricky because, as explained by the First Law of Thermodynamics, "energy" is actually conserved. That means that the energy exiting from any process or transformation is always equal to the energy going into the process. There is no gain or loss, so the efficiency must be 100 percent by definition. So, the first problem with the Bridges document (and almost all public discussions of energy) is that these discussions are not really about energy, but about the useful component, which they do not define. However there is a technical definition of useful energy, which is energy that can do useful work. The technical term is exergy.
The distinction between the simplistic "simple-ratio" measure of energy efficiency and the technical measure of real output (exergy) is typically ignored, for instance, by companies advertising the energy efficiency of gas hot water heaters or other equipment. They may claim that the heater is 85 percent efficient because 85 percent of the heat from the burner goes into the water and therefore only 15 percent is lost "up the stack." The arithmetic might be correct, but it is seriously misleading because it incorrectly implies that heat at a low temperature is just as useful (in the sense of being able to do work) as heat at a high temperature. The temperature of the gas flame in the heater is very high, around 1,800 degrees (Kelvin) above absolute zero, while the temperature of the hot water that emerges is only a few degrees above room temperature (around 300 degrees above absolute zero).
The correct way to measure efficiency is to treat both the input and output in exergy terms. The input (say natural gas) has a high exergy content because it burns at a high temperature, whereas the output (hot water) has a very low exergy content because it is only a little above room temperature (as compared to the flame heat). So, the real exergy efficiency of a hot water heater must be very low, in the sense that the same amount of heat produced by the flame could have done a lot more work than it actually ends up doing when you wash dishes or take a shower. In effect, the heater wastes most of the temperature difference between the gas flame and the water. In exergy terms, the efficiency of most water and space-heating systems was (and still is) only around 5 percent. In exergy terms, much the same problem applies to all of those early-and most subsequent-calculations.
The resulting misconception has persisted not just in equipment advertising but throughout the economy, and may be one of the reasons that the Bush/Cheney administration-and media-were so disinclined to see further efficiency gains as having anything more than marginal potential. They thought the country was already doing pretty well on that front. Ironically, that sanguine view was perpetuated not only by promotional literature for water heaters and other products, but by the modifications made by hundreds of businesses in the 1970s and '80s to reduce pollution to meet the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts-modifications which also had the benefit of reducing fuel use and thereby improving energy efficiency. Since then, thousands of industrial processes and products have been made less polluting and (slightly) more efficient. Yet, all along, the bulk of the nation's energy has continued to go up in smoke.
The view that America is becoming ever more energy efficient has been further reinforced, recently, by well-meaning and well-justified promotion of compact fluorescent bulbs, hybrid cars, and the like. However, a more disconcerting view is revealed by tracking the efficiency not just of the water heater or lightbulb or hybrid power train, but of the sequence of processes from the burning of primary energy materials to the final "energy service." The economy is becoming increasingly electrified (newspapers giving way to telecommunications, offices to telecommuting, and, soon, gasoline cars to more hybrids and then plug-ins), so the place to begin this tracking is with the electric power plants. A barrel of oil-equivalent (the natural-gas or coal equivalent to a barrel of oil) going into the power plant becomes, on average, one-third of a barrel of oil-equivalent (as electrical energy) arriving at the electric meter box. But then, to get the overall efficiency of the actual energy service, you have to multiply that 33-percent efficiency by the efficiency with which the consumer uses that delivered power, whether it's to turn on a light, drive a car, or run a manufacturing plant.
Everyone knows now that an incandescent lightbulb has very poor end-use efficiency in terms of lumens per watt, and that compact fluorescents are far better. But while fluorescent lighting gets about three times the efficiency of incandescent (about 15 percent vs. the incandescent bulb's 5 percent), when multiplied by the 33 percent of the power delivered to it (.33 x .15), the total efficiency of the compact fluorescent light is just 5 percent.
Similarly, we may be encouraged by the advent of plug-in electric cars, but while the average mechanical efficiency of an electric motor is around 80 percent (depending on size, speed, etc.), the charge-discharge cycle for the battery itself probably loses 20 percent each way, so a car using plug-in electricity from a 33-percent-efficiency central power plant might have an overall efficiency around 16 to 18 percent. That is a lot more efficient than a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle operating in city traffic, but still ends up letting five of every six barrels of oil-equivalent go to waste.
Then consider the payload efficiency you get when you drive a car. Set aside the question of whether it makes sense, in a country where energy is no longer cheap, to move over a thousand kilograms of steel in order to transport your 100 kilograms, or whatever you and your luggage or shopping bags weigh. The exergy efficiency of moving the car itself is about 10 percent, so the payload efficiency of what's being transported (assuming it's one-tenth the weight of the car) is about 1 percent. If you carry a second person, or have a lot of stuff in the back, the payload efficiency might be 2 or 3 percent. If the car is electric, you might get 4 percent. Some day, historians will shake their heads in wonder. Buses and trucks do a lot better on payload, but if you add up all the different kinds of energy use in the United States, the overall efficiency of producing useful work is just that 13 percent.
Barriers and Breakthroughs
For many years, the assumption of most industries that they were already operating at close to optimal efficiency, combined with the low cost of fuel for most of the past century, meant that as a public policy issue, energy efficiency was of only marginal interest except to environmentalists. Few people grasped that the country's energy efficiency was so poor and that there was so much potential for increasing actual energy service (lighting, heating, mobility, communications) without consuming more fossil fuel.
Tom Casten, however, saw this disparity between prevailing ideology and the physical reality as a business opportunity. About a decade ago, he formed an energy service company, Primary Energy. His idea was to approach industries that used coal, oil, or natural gas to fire their plants, and offer to capture their waste energy and turn it into electricity that was not only cheaper than what the plant was currently buying, but also produced no carbon emissions. If his company could produce 10 megawatts (MW) of clean electricity from the plant's waste, at a nicely discounted price (since the coal or oil had already been purchased for the plant's core business), that was also 10 MW that the local utility wouldn't have to produce by burning coal or natural gas.
One of Casten's first attempts to sell the idea was to a carbon-black plant in Louisiana. Carbon black is a petroleum-based product used mainly in making tires. In the late 1990s, the Massachusetts-based Cabot Corporation was the largest U.S. producer of carbon black. But the company was being hobbled by a worrisome pattern, which was to become increasingly familiar to U.S. industry during the following decade: While its foreign operations were thriving, its domestic production was barely profitable. In 1999, the situation significantly worsened as crude oil prices rose and the company's sales were undercut by rising imports of cheap foreign tires. Cabot needed a way to reduce costs. It was also under some pressure to reduce its air pollution, as making carbon black is an exceptionally dirty process that basically involves spraying oil particles into a flame. At its two Louisiana plants, Canal and Ville Platte, Cabot was emitting about 23 million kilograms of pollutants per year from its smokestacks.
Primary Energy proposed building a facility that would intercept Cabot's hot flue gas and convert it to clean electric power. An agreement was drawn up whereby the energy recycling facility would be built next to the carbon-black plant, which was emitting enough hot gas to generate 30 MW of electricity. The Cabot plant was using 10 MW, and it was currently purchasing that 10 MW from the local electric utility, CLECO, at a price of US$55 per megawatthour (MWh). In the proposed deal with the energy-recycling company, it was agreed that the needed 10 MW would now be provided by the recycling facility for $45 per MWh. By using its own waste to power its plant (waste out one door, power back in the other), Cabot would gain a double dividend: It would cut the cost of its Louisiana operation, improving the marginal profitability of its domestic production; and it would greatly reduce its embarrassing pollution output.
The only other principal condition was that since the recycling facility had a 30-MW capacity and would be selling just 10 MW back to Cabot, it would need another buyer for the remaining 20 MW. Because it would not have to purchase fuel to make power the way the utility did, it could sell power at a discount (as it would be doing for Cabot), and since every buyer likes a discount, the deal seemed pretty close to a slam dunk. As it happened, there was another carbon-black plant, Columbian Chemicals (a subsidiary of Phelps-Dodge), just across the road that, like Cabot, was currently buying its power from the utility for $55 per MWh and would be more than happy to buy it from the recycling facility for less.
There was, however, one problem. The law in Louisiana, and almost everywhere else in the country, does not permit anyone other than the utility monopoly to sell power. It was made clear that the only way the deal could work would be for the utility to serve as a middleman-for the recycling facility to send its extra 20 MW to the utility, which would then sell it to the buyer. Since the power would essentially go in one door of the utility and out the other, with no intermediate processing, the utility would incur only an administrative cost, which would be negligible. Ideally, the recycling facility could sell to the utility at $45 and the utility could sell to the buyer at $50 and still be passing along part of the discount the buyer would have had if the law hadn't prohibited a direct transmission across the road. You might think that CLECO would accept a windfall profit of around $5 per MWh for itself while helping to perform the public service of substantially reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants.
However, CLECO saw it differently. To them it was a loss of retail sales to both Cabot and Columbia Chemicals. Worse, it undermined their pending case to the public utility commission for building a new $50 million transmission line to serve the Canal and Ville Platte area, the cost of which could then be added to their rate base for the whole state. But the real problem with approving a recycling deal was that by reducing demand for power in that area of the state, the recycling facility would also undermine the utility's case for building future "central" power plants, the cost of which would also be included in its rate base. Why go along with a project that would reduce the state's fuel use, when it could hold out for an arrangement that would let it profit from increasing fuel use?
So, rather than agreeing to the opportunity for a win-win solution for the community, the utility said it would only pay $20 per MWh for the remaining 20 MW-a deal killer, since the recycling facility could not operate profitably at that rate and clearly couldn't undertake construction if that was all it would get. CLECO stuck to that price for a year, before raising its offer to $28-still far too low for the plan to work. After two more years, the utility raised its offer to $38, which was close but still tauntingly short of what would have worked. By this time, however, both Cabot and Primary Energy had reached the end of their rope and the project was abandoned.
Soon afterward, CLECO applied for-and quickly received-permission to build its hoped-for new central power plant, at least in part to provide the capacity that would have been provided by the energy recycling plant. The difference was that now that capacity would have to be provided by an additional supply of fuel burned at 33-percent efficiency, along with its commensurate power plant emissions. In the years since then, the Cabot facility has had to continue pouring its emissions into the sky instead of having them intercepted and turned into clean power.
The Cabot project failed-and hundreds of other projects that could have cut U.S. fossil fuel combustion and carbon emissions have similarly been scotched-because of institutional barriers, outdated laws, and pervasive misconceptions that have been kept out of public discussion. Among them:
‑A fundamental weakness of the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), which was intended to encourage local competition in electric power production and distribution (including solar and wind), but which has failed to do so in part because the Act leaves it to individual states to enforce. Some states, including Louisiana (the number-one producer of petroleum products) have ignored it. The Act has no teeth.
‑Regulated pricing that allows no credit to local producers of wind or solar power for eliminating the transmission costs of central power plants, or for producing electricity without generating carbon emissions. Even if you generate enough solar PV electricity to sell some back to the utility, there is no economic incentive to do so.
‑The laws that in effect prevent electricity producers (such as Primary Energy, but also such as individuals or small businesses generating solar or wind power) from selling to willing buyers across the street. Utilities (and the public utility commissions that largely do their bidding) own unchallenged monopoly power over anyone (other than fellow utilities) who tries to compete with them. Small solar or wind entrepreneurs are priced out by law.
While Casten's Louisiana venture was effectively killed off, his initiatives in Indiana have succeeded because the power produced by the Mittal coking facility isn't being transmitted across any public streets; it's being sold to the adjoining Mittal Steel property. At U.S. Steel, similarly, the waste-stream energy isn't being sold to another company across town, but is only being used for in-house power. At a giant Kodak plant in Rochester, New York, waste process steam is used to make power for the company's own use.
There are roughly a thousand other U.S. plants already doing waste-energy recycling. In addition to the two aforementioned Indiana steel plants, they include 12 other steel plants. An Illinois-based company, Turbosteam, has built waste-heat recycling facilities for plants in the chemical, petroleum, pulp and paper, food-processing, textiles, and automotive industries, as well as well as for college campuses, military bases, prisons, and hospitals. At a huge complex in Rochester, New York, the Kodak Corporation generates its own electricity from waste process steam. At a West Virginia silicon-processing plant, West Virginia Alloys, a unit of Globe Specialty Metals, recently invested about $50 million to install a facility that will capture waste heat from its electric arc furnaces. The operation will provide over 40 MW of emissions-free electricity, offsetting about a third of the company's electric consumption. West Virginia Alloys president Arden Sims points out that this will give his company a competitive advantage over other silicon producers that typically vent their waste heat.
All told, U.S. waste-energy recycling is contributing about 10,000 megawatts of electric power to the national total each year, according to the latest available data. Yet, according to a recent study for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than 10 times that amount could be generated in 19 different U.S. industries just by recycling wasted heat. Most of it would be electricity replacing electric power currently purchased from coal- or natural gas-burning utilities. To put that potential in a broader perspective, we should note that waste-energy recycling of the kind we have been describing is a form of combined heat and power (CHP), which includes the even larger potential to be achieved by exploiting the waste heat emitted by electric power plants (see page 37). The heat from power plants can't be used to generate electricity because it is too low in temperature, but if the generation is moved to local production in the places where low-temperature heat could be used for heating homes and buildings, the largest single drain on U.S. primary energy could be largely eliminated. Data for CHP don't always separate out local-production CHP from high-temperature waste-stream recycling, but it is noteworthy that while the United States uses relatively little of either, both forms are now widely used in some other countries. One reason Arcelor Mittal was receptive to energy recycling in Indiana was that this technology is now widely used in northern Europe and Japan, where Mittal has other operations. Denmark now generates over 50 percent of its electricity by waste-energy recycling or CHP; Finland gets 40 percent, and Russia gets over 30 percent. U.S. industries have barely scratched the surface. The 14 steel plants recycling waste heat or flare gas, for example, constitute only 2 percent of the plants in the U.S. steel industry.
That brings us back to Tom Casten and his son Sean, who are entrepreneurs of the kind economists have in mind when they speak of "technological progress"-but who are acutely aware of the importance both of energy productivity and of the abundance of business opportunity in that realm. Businesses like theirs may benefit from government boosts, but as public awareness of the new energy paradigm grows, they'll also get stronger support from private investment. In 2006, the Castens set up a new company, Recycled Energy Development (RED). And in November 2007, RED announced that it had been approved to receive up to $1.5 billion in private investment from the Boston-based private-equity fund Denham Capital Management. Major investors included Harvard University and Bill Gates. Energy recycling had come a long way from its Louisiana fiasco.
The Recycled Energy Development announcement was not an anomaly. As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to rise-and as public concerns about the global energy dilemma also rise-private investment in the energy transition bridge may shift from tentative to robust. The key, as we have shown, is that in many cases, such investments can bring the double dividends of both corporate and social benefits, often with a rapid return on investment. That discovery "is allowing much bigger capital deployments than we've seen," said John Balbach, a managing partner at Cleantech Group LLC of Brighton, Michigan, at the time of the RED announcement. And as Riaz Siddiqui, a senior managing director at Denham, put it, "The exciting feature is reducing the carbon footprint of U.S. industry profitably."
If the energy content of all U.S. smokestack waste were recycled, it could replace about 30 percent of the electricity now produced by burning fossil fuels. Even so, energy recycling is just one of several high-potential strategies we know of that can reduce both fossil-fuel use and carbon emissions during the long transitional period ahead. Yet most of them have received little or no attention from mainstream media and policymakers. In a book to be published next January by Prentice Hall, Crossing the Energy Divide, we emphasize that none of these strategies depends on new or yet-to-be-developed technologies; all are well proven. Most are (quietly) being used profitably. Public discussion of them has been discouraged by utility lobbyists, oil-company advertising, talk-radio campaigns by oil-funded politicians such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe (the one who famously said "Global warming is a liberal hoax"), and by the historically entrenched inclination to expect that energy will always be cheap. Once these barriers have been cleared, the U.S. and global energy economies can establish a solid bridge to the day when renewables will substantially replace fossil fuels.
Robert U. Ayres is emeritus professor of technology and economics at the European business school INSEAD, in Fountainbleau, France. Ed Ayres is a former editor of World Watch. The brothers' forthcoming book will be published under the Whatrton School imprint of Prentice Hall.
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Waste-Energy Recyling Underutilized in U.S.
Waste-Energy Recyling Underutilized in U.S.
SustainableBusiness.com News
The United States throws away a staggering amount of energy that could be cheaply and easily captured and used, according to a report in the latest issue of World Watch magazine.
Waste-energy recycling, which captures smokestack waste and other wasted energy and puts it to work, currently contributes about 10,000 megawatts (MW) of electric power to the U.S. national total each year. But a recent study estimates that if the energy content of all U.S. smokestack waste were recycled, it could replace roughly 30% of the electricity produced by burning fossil fuels. Elsewhere the technology is widely used: Russia gets over 30% of its electricity from waste-energy recovery, while Denmark gets more than 50%.
This underutilized technology has the ability to bridge the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, according to the report's co-authors Robert Ayres and Ed Ayres.
"As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide also rise, and as public concerns about the global energy dilemma also rise, private investment in the energy transition bridge may shift from tentative to robust," they write. "The key...is that in many cases, such investments can bring the double dividends of both corporate and social benefits, often with a rapid return on investment."
Eenergy recycling is just one of several high-potential strategies that can reduce both fossil-fuel use and carbon emissions during the long transitional period ahead.
"Waste-energy streams aren't a substitute for renewables, of course; the point is we're going to need both. And energy recycling from fossil fuel-burning plants can help us make the transition to renewables much sooner."
Read "Bridge to a Renewable Energy Future" at the link below.
Website: www.worldwatch.org/node/6225
SustainableBusiness.com News
The United States throws away a staggering amount of energy that could be cheaply and easily captured and used, according to a report in the latest issue of World Watch magazine.
Waste-energy recycling, which captures smokestack waste and other wasted energy and puts it to work, currently contributes about 10,000 megawatts (MW) of electric power to the U.S. national total each year. But a recent study estimates that if the energy content of all U.S. smokestack waste were recycled, it could replace roughly 30% of the electricity produced by burning fossil fuels. Elsewhere the technology is widely used: Russia gets over 30% of its electricity from waste-energy recovery, while Denmark gets more than 50%.
This underutilized technology has the ability to bridge the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, according to the report's co-authors Robert Ayres and Ed Ayres.
"As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide also rise, and as public concerns about the global energy dilemma also rise, private investment in the energy transition bridge may shift from tentative to robust," they write. "The key...is that in many cases, such investments can bring the double dividends of both corporate and social benefits, often with a rapid return on investment."
Eenergy recycling is just one of several high-potential strategies that can reduce both fossil-fuel use and carbon emissions during the long transitional period ahead.
"Waste-energy streams aren't a substitute for renewables, of course; the point is we're going to need both. And energy recycling from fossil fuel-burning plants can help us make the transition to renewables much sooner."
Read "Bridge to a Renewable Energy Future" at the link below.
Website: www.worldwatch.org/node/6225
Boston Proposes Bike-sharing Plan
updated 10:53 a.m. PT, Fri., Aug 14, 2009
BOSTON - The city is entering talks with a Montreal-based company to create what would be the nation's largest urban bike-sharing system.
Boston officials are hoping to reach a decision with the Public Bike System Co. in the next 60 days to install a network of 2,500 bikes and 290 stations across the city by next summer, with the option of expanding to a 5,000-bike system encompassing the neighboring communities Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville.
Under the system, a rider would be able to rent a bike from one location with the swipe of a credit card, pedal to his or her destination and then drop off the bike at another location.
Those already experienced in negotiating Boston's narrow, twisting streets on two wheels say they'll welcome the company.
"We're excited about it," said David Watson, executive director of MassBike, a statewide bicycling advocacy group. "It creates an opportunity for people who don't think of themselves as bicyclists to shift some of their trips from cars to bicycles."
The system would be modeled after Montreal's bike-sharing program, BIXI, a subscription-based service with 3,000 bikes and 300 stations.
Paris, France, is also an early adopter of bike sharing but its fleet has been targeted by thieves, undermining the entire program.
Annual or daily fees
Under the Montreal system, riders pay for subscriptions ranging from $78 per year to $5 per day. A subscription gives the rider the right to an unlimited number of trips. To encourage shorter trips, the first 30 minutes of each trip are free, with usage fees kicking in for longer trips.
Public Bike chairman Roger Plamondon said Montreal loaned the company $15 million to launch that city's program, but he said the company would cover the cost of setting up the system in Boston.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, an avid cyclist, called the city "a perfect venue" for the program, noting it recently added miles of bike lanes and hundreds of bike racks and launched a stolen-bike alert system using online social media networks.
Leaders in Cambridge, Brookline and Somerville say they're hoping to add the service to their communities to give it a broader, metropolitan-Boston reach.
"So many Somerville residents already commute to work by bike, so why not make it even easier for folks to make those small, midday trips by bike as well?" Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone said.
If approved, Boston's system would be far larger than the nation's only existing urban bike-sharing program, in Washington, D.C., which has about 100 bicycles and 12 stations.
Portland, Seattle also eye
Officials in Portland, Ore., are weighing whether to create a paid bike-sharing program after an experiment with a free system in the 1990s collapsed because of vandalism and theft.
Officials in the Seattle, Wash., area are also exploring the idea.
Even as Boston gears up for the possible influx of thousands of new bike riders, Massachusetts is taking steps to smooth the sometimes testy relations between motorists and cyclists who vie for space on the roads.
A new law that went into effect in July creates a $100 fine for drivers who open their doors into the paths of bicycles and prohibits drivers from making sharp right turns cutting off cyclists. It also allows police to treat bicyclists like motorists when writing tickets for running red lights and other moving violations.
BOSTON - The city is entering talks with a Montreal-based company to create what would be the nation's largest urban bike-sharing system.
Boston officials are hoping to reach a decision with the Public Bike System Co. in the next 60 days to install a network of 2,500 bikes and 290 stations across the city by next summer, with the option of expanding to a 5,000-bike system encompassing the neighboring communities Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville.
Under the system, a rider would be able to rent a bike from one location with the swipe of a credit card, pedal to his or her destination and then drop off the bike at another location.
Those already experienced in negotiating Boston's narrow, twisting streets on two wheels say they'll welcome the company.
"We're excited about it," said David Watson, executive director of MassBike, a statewide bicycling advocacy group. "It creates an opportunity for people who don't think of themselves as bicyclists to shift some of their trips from cars to bicycles."
The system would be modeled after Montreal's bike-sharing program, BIXI, a subscription-based service with 3,000 bikes and 300 stations.
Paris, France, is also an early adopter of bike sharing but its fleet has been targeted by thieves, undermining the entire program.
Annual or daily fees
Under the Montreal system, riders pay for subscriptions ranging from $78 per year to $5 per day. A subscription gives the rider the right to an unlimited number of trips. To encourage shorter trips, the first 30 minutes of each trip are free, with usage fees kicking in for longer trips.
Public Bike chairman Roger Plamondon said Montreal loaned the company $15 million to launch that city's program, but he said the company would cover the cost of setting up the system in Boston.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, an avid cyclist, called the city "a perfect venue" for the program, noting it recently added miles of bike lanes and hundreds of bike racks and launched a stolen-bike alert system using online social media networks.
Leaders in Cambridge, Brookline and Somerville say they're hoping to add the service to their communities to give it a broader, metropolitan-Boston reach.
"So many Somerville residents already commute to work by bike, so why not make it even easier for folks to make those small, midday trips by bike as well?" Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone said.
If approved, Boston's system would be far larger than the nation's only existing urban bike-sharing program, in Washington, D.C., which has about 100 bicycles and 12 stations.
Portland, Seattle also eye
Officials in Portland, Ore., are weighing whether to create a paid bike-sharing program after an experiment with a free system in the 1990s collapsed because of vandalism and theft.
Officials in the Seattle, Wash., area are also exploring the idea.
Even as Boston gears up for the possible influx of thousands of new bike riders, Massachusetts is taking steps to smooth the sometimes testy relations between motorists and cyclists who vie for space on the roads.
A new law that went into effect in July creates a $100 fine for drivers who open their doors into the paths of bicycles and prohibits drivers from making sharp right turns cutting off cyclists. It also allows police to treat bicyclists like motorists when writing tickets for running red lights and other moving violations.
Monday, August 17, 2009
FACT CHECK: No 'death panel' in health care bill
FACT CHECK: No 'death panel' in health care bill
AP – FILE - By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press Writer – Tue Aug 11, 3:04 am ET
WASHINGTON – Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin says the health care overhaul bill would set up a "death panel." Federal bureaucrats would play God, ruling on whether ailing seniors are worth enough to society to deserve life-sustaining medical care. Palin and other critics are wrong.
Nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision. The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes. Here are some questions and answers on the controversy:
Q: Does the health care legislation bill promote "mercy killing," or euthanasia?
A: No.
Q: Then what's all the fuss about?
A: A provision in the House bill written by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., would allow Medicare to pay doctors for voluntary counseling sessions that address end-of-life issues. The conversations between doctor and patient would include living wills, making a close relative or a trusted friend your health care proxy, learning about hospice as an option for the terminally ill, and information about pain medications for people suffering chronic discomfort.
The sessions would be covered every five years, more frequently if someone is gravely ill.
Q: Is anything required?
Monsignor Charles Fahey, 76, a Catholic priest who is chairman of the board of the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit service and advocacy group, says no.
"We have to make decisions that are deliberative about our health care at every moment," Fahey said. "What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini — then let me go."
Q: Does the bill advocate assisted suicide?
A: No. It would block funds for counseling that presents suicide or assisted suicide as an option.
Q: Who supports the provision?
A: The American Medical Association, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and Consumers Union are among the groups supporting the provision. AARP, the seniors' lobby, is taking out print advertisements this week that label as false the claim that the legislation will empower the government to take over life-and-death decisions from individuals.
Q: Should the federal government be getting involved with living wills and end-of-life questions — decisions that are highly personal and really difficult?
A: It already is.
The government requires hospitals to ask adult patients if they have a living will, or "advance directive." If the patient doesn't have one, and wants one, the hospital has to provide assistance. The mandate on hospitals was instituted during a Republican administration, in 1992, under President George H.W. Bush.
Q: How does a living will work, and how is it different from a health care proxy?
A: A living will — also called an advance directive — spells out a patient's wishes if he or she becomes incapacitated. Often people say they don't want to be kept alive on breathing machines if their condition is terminal and irreversible.
A health care proxy empowers another person to make medical decisions should the patient become incapacitated.
There's also a power-of-attorney, which authorizes another person to make financial decisions for someone who is incapacitated.
Such legal documents have become standard estate-planning tools in the last twenty years.
Q: Would the health overhaul legislation change the way people now deal with making end-of-life decisions?
A: It very well could.
Supporters of the provision say the main consequence would be to formally bring doctors into a discussion that now takes place mainly among family members and lawyers.
"When you execute a legal document with your lawyer, it ends up in your files and in the lawyer's files," said John Rother, a senior policy and strategy adviser for AARP. "Unless the doctor is part of this discussion, it's unlikely that your wishes will be respected. The doctor will be the one involved in any decisions."
The American Medical Association says involving doctors is simple common sense.
"There has been a lot of misinformation about the advance care planning provisions in the bill," AMA President Dr. James Rohack said in a statement. "It's plain, old-fashioned medical care."
Q: So why are some people upset?
Some social conservatives say stronger language is needed to protect seniors from being pressured into signing away their rights to medical treatment in a moment of depression or despair.
The National Right to Life Committee opposes the provision as written.
"I'm not aware of 'death panels' in the bill," said David O'Steen, executive director of the group. "I'm not aware of anything that says you will be hauled before a government bureaucrat. But we are concerned ... it doesn't take a lot to push a vulnerable person — perhaps unwittingly — to give up their right to life-sustaining treatment."
The White House says it is countering false claims with a "reality check" page on its Web site, http://www.whitehouse.gov.
AP – FILE - By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press Writer – Tue Aug 11, 3:04 am ET
WASHINGTON – Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin says the health care overhaul bill would set up a "death panel." Federal bureaucrats would play God, ruling on whether ailing seniors are worth enough to society to deserve life-sustaining medical care. Palin and other critics are wrong.
Nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision. The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes. Here are some questions and answers on the controversy:
Q: Does the health care legislation bill promote "mercy killing," or euthanasia?
A: No.
Q: Then what's all the fuss about?
A: A provision in the House bill written by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., would allow Medicare to pay doctors for voluntary counseling sessions that address end-of-life issues. The conversations between doctor and patient would include living wills, making a close relative or a trusted friend your health care proxy, learning about hospice as an option for the terminally ill, and information about pain medications for people suffering chronic discomfort.
The sessions would be covered every five years, more frequently if someone is gravely ill.
Q: Is anything required?
Monsignor Charles Fahey, 76, a Catholic priest who is chairman of the board of the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit service and advocacy group, says no.
"We have to make decisions that are deliberative about our health care at every moment," Fahey said. "What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini — then let me go."
Q: Does the bill advocate assisted suicide?
A: No. It would block funds for counseling that presents suicide or assisted suicide as an option.
Q: Who supports the provision?
A: The American Medical Association, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and Consumers Union are among the groups supporting the provision. AARP, the seniors' lobby, is taking out print advertisements this week that label as false the claim that the legislation will empower the government to take over life-and-death decisions from individuals.
Q: Should the federal government be getting involved with living wills and end-of-life questions — decisions that are highly personal and really difficult?
A: It already is.
The government requires hospitals to ask adult patients if they have a living will, or "advance directive." If the patient doesn't have one, and wants one, the hospital has to provide assistance. The mandate on hospitals was instituted during a Republican administration, in 1992, under President George H.W. Bush.
Q: How does a living will work, and how is it different from a health care proxy?
A: A living will — also called an advance directive — spells out a patient's wishes if he or she becomes incapacitated. Often people say they don't want to be kept alive on breathing machines if their condition is terminal and irreversible.
A health care proxy empowers another person to make medical decisions should the patient become incapacitated.
There's also a power-of-attorney, which authorizes another person to make financial decisions for someone who is incapacitated.
Such legal documents have become standard estate-planning tools in the last twenty years.
Q: Would the health overhaul legislation change the way people now deal with making end-of-life decisions?
A: It very well could.
Supporters of the provision say the main consequence would be to formally bring doctors into a discussion that now takes place mainly among family members and lawyers.
"When you execute a legal document with your lawyer, it ends up in your files and in the lawyer's files," said John Rother, a senior policy and strategy adviser for AARP. "Unless the doctor is part of this discussion, it's unlikely that your wishes will be respected. The doctor will be the one involved in any decisions."
The American Medical Association says involving doctors is simple common sense.
"There has been a lot of misinformation about the advance care planning provisions in the bill," AMA President Dr. James Rohack said in a statement. "It's plain, old-fashioned medical care."
Q: So why are some people upset?
Some social conservatives say stronger language is needed to protect seniors from being pressured into signing away their rights to medical treatment in a moment of depression or despair.
The National Right to Life Committee opposes the provision as written.
"I'm not aware of 'death panels' in the bill," said David O'Steen, executive director of the group. "I'm not aware of anything that says you will be hauled before a government bureaucrat. But we are concerned ... it doesn't take a lot to push a vulnerable person — perhaps unwittingly — to give up their right to life-sustaining treatment."
The White House says it is countering false claims with a "reality check" page on its Web site, http://www.whitehouse.gov.
New NIH chief: Turn science into better care, fast
New NIH chief: Turn science into better care, fast
AP – Dr. Francis Collins, a scientist who helped unravel the human genetic code, talks about his role as the …
FOX News By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer – 1 hr 17 mins ago
WASHINGTON – An influential geneticist who wears his faith on his sleeve says that as the new director of the National Institutes of Health he won't inject his religious convictions into medical research while pushing cutting-edge science into better bedside care.
"The NIH director needs to focus on science," Dr. Francis Collins told The Associated Press on Monday. "I have no religious agenda for the NIH."
In taking the reins of the NIH, Collins — best known for unraveling the human genetic code — said he wants a practical focus for the nation's premier research agency, that new discoveries may even help save precious health care dollars.
"We should be completely bold about pushing that agenda," Collins said — not just for U.S. health, but for global health, too.
"Here we are at a circumstance where I think our country is seeking maybe to redefine our image a bit in the world, from being the soldier to the world to being perhaps the doctor to the world. I'd like to see that happen," he said, in his first interview before greeting employees of the $30 billion agency.
The Bush administration drew criticism for allowing religious ideology to guide some decision-making, such as curbs on the NIH's funding of research involving embryonic stem cells.
Collins is well-known for finding common ground between belief in God and science, without letting his evangelical Christian beliefs influence his 15 years of research at the NIH. He led the Human Genome Project that, along with a competing private company, mapped the genetic code that he famously called "the book of human life." Remarkably for Washington, Collins' team was ahead of schedule and under budget.
The folksy Collins, who explains the complexities of DNA in language the average person can understand, at the time called it "awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God."
He left NIH last year to, among other things, work with Barack Obama's presidential campaign — and to help found the BioLogos Foundation, a Web site formed by scientists who said they want to bridge gaps between the two groups. Collins, 59, said he resigned from the Web site the day before assuming his new job, but was proud of its work.
"I do think the current battle that's going on in our culture between extreme voices is not a productive one," he said. "The chance to play some kind of useful role in that conversation by pointing out the potential harmony was something that seemed to be making some inroads."
In a near-empty office Monday, nothing yet unpacked on his bare desk, an eager Collins outlined his goals for the NIH's next few years. Look for an emphasis on the new field of personalized medicine, which promises to use someone's genes to customize ways for them to stay healthy and fight disease, rather than today's one-size-fits-all advice.
It's already starting. Thousands of breast cancer survivors undergo chemotherapy they don't need in order to be sure the handful with particularly aggressive disease are treated. New genetic tests are cutting back on the unneeded chemo, and saving at least $100 million a year in health care costs, Collins said.
Also look for an emphasis on stem cell research. Under President Barack Obama's new policy on embryonic stem cells, which Collins helped develop, the agency now is deciding which of the 700 known embryonic stem cell batches, or "lines," are eligible for taxpayer-funded research. But Collins also marvels at another option, giving ordinary skin cells the same regenerative properties of embryonic stem cells.
"Clearly there's a lot we don't know, a huge amount we don't know, about the therapeutic uses" of either type, Collins said. "We ought to be thinking of every creative way to speed up the agenda for testing" that.
He is excited by a new law pushing for academic researchers, including NIH scientists, to turn discoveries about rare or neglected diseases into potentially usable drugs by performing the risky, early-stage development that can deter drug company investment.
And new technologies — high-capacity computing, nanotechnology — make it a powerful time to finally broadly study what makes different diseases arise.
"This really does seem like a synthetic moment," he joked.
Collins' vision is to knock down a bit of the NIH's ivory-tower reputation in a bid for more openness with scientists and the public. So the gene hunter who last spring posed in cool shades as part of GQ magazine's campaign to bring celebrity to science already is looking forward to his invitation to appear on the satirical television show "The Colbert Report."
After a standing ovation from a community that he dubbed "the NIH tribe," he told employees, "It's great to be home again."
AP – Dr. Francis Collins, a scientist who helped unravel the human genetic code, talks about his role as the …
FOX News By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer – 1 hr 17 mins ago
WASHINGTON – An influential geneticist who wears his faith on his sleeve says that as the new director of the National Institutes of Health he won't inject his religious convictions into medical research while pushing cutting-edge science into better bedside care.
"The NIH director needs to focus on science," Dr. Francis Collins told The Associated Press on Monday. "I have no religious agenda for the NIH."
In taking the reins of the NIH, Collins — best known for unraveling the human genetic code — said he wants a practical focus for the nation's premier research agency, that new discoveries may even help save precious health care dollars.
"We should be completely bold about pushing that agenda," Collins said — not just for U.S. health, but for global health, too.
"Here we are at a circumstance where I think our country is seeking maybe to redefine our image a bit in the world, from being the soldier to the world to being perhaps the doctor to the world. I'd like to see that happen," he said, in his first interview before greeting employees of the $30 billion agency.
The Bush administration drew criticism for allowing religious ideology to guide some decision-making, such as curbs on the NIH's funding of research involving embryonic stem cells.
Collins is well-known for finding common ground between belief in God and science, without letting his evangelical Christian beliefs influence his 15 years of research at the NIH. He led the Human Genome Project that, along with a competing private company, mapped the genetic code that he famously called "the book of human life." Remarkably for Washington, Collins' team was ahead of schedule and under budget.
The folksy Collins, who explains the complexities of DNA in language the average person can understand, at the time called it "awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God."
He left NIH last year to, among other things, work with Barack Obama's presidential campaign — and to help found the BioLogos Foundation, a Web site formed by scientists who said they want to bridge gaps between the two groups. Collins, 59, said he resigned from the Web site the day before assuming his new job, but was proud of its work.
"I do think the current battle that's going on in our culture between extreme voices is not a productive one," he said. "The chance to play some kind of useful role in that conversation by pointing out the potential harmony was something that seemed to be making some inroads."
In a near-empty office Monday, nothing yet unpacked on his bare desk, an eager Collins outlined his goals for the NIH's next few years. Look for an emphasis on the new field of personalized medicine, which promises to use someone's genes to customize ways for them to stay healthy and fight disease, rather than today's one-size-fits-all advice.
It's already starting. Thousands of breast cancer survivors undergo chemotherapy they don't need in order to be sure the handful with particularly aggressive disease are treated. New genetic tests are cutting back on the unneeded chemo, and saving at least $100 million a year in health care costs, Collins said.
Also look for an emphasis on stem cell research. Under President Barack Obama's new policy on embryonic stem cells, which Collins helped develop, the agency now is deciding which of the 700 known embryonic stem cell batches, or "lines," are eligible for taxpayer-funded research. But Collins also marvels at another option, giving ordinary skin cells the same regenerative properties of embryonic stem cells.
"Clearly there's a lot we don't know, a huge amount we don't know, about the therapeutic uses" of either type, Collins said. "We ought to be thinking of every creative way to speed up the agenda for testing" that.
He is excited by a new law pushing for academic researchers, including NIH scientists, to turn discoveries about rare or neglected diseases into potentially usable drugs by performing the risky, early-stage development that can deter drug company investment.
And new technologies — high-capacity computing, nanotechnology — make it a powerful time to finally broadly study what makes different diseases arise.
"This really does seem like a synthetic moment," he joked.
Collins' vision is to knock down a bit of the NIH's ivory-tower reputation in a bid for more openness with scientists and the public. So the gene hunter who last spring posed in cool shades as part of GQ magazine's campaign to bring celebrity to science already is looking forward to his invitation to appear on the satirical television show "The Colbert Report."
After a standing ovation from a community that he dubbed "the NIH tribe," he told employees, "It's great to be home again."
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